Rodrigue Tremblay

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Rodrigue Tremblay (born October 13, 1939) is a Canadian-born economist, humanist and political figure. He teaches economics at the Université de Montréal. He specializes in macroeconomics, international trade and finance, and public finance. He is a prolific author of books in economics and politics.

•Born in Matane, Québec, Canada, he has a B.A. from the Université Laval (1961), a B.Sc. in Economics from the Université de Montréal (1963). Tremblay did his graduate work at Stanford University where he obtained a M.A. in Economics (1965) and a Ph.D. in Economics (1968).

•He has been a professor of economics at the Université de Montréal since 1967. He is professor emeritus since 2002.

•Tremblay was president of the Association canadienne de science économique (1974-75) and of the North American Economics and Finance Association (1986-87). He was chairman of the Department of Economics of the Université de Montréal (1973-76) ), member of the Committee of Dispute Settlements of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) (1989-93) and vice-president of the Association internationale des économistes de langue française (AIELF), from 1999 to 2005.

•He was invited scholar and economic consultant at the Bank of Canada, the Economic Council of Canada, the Quebec Commission of Inquiry on the Quebec Liquor Trade, the West African Monetary Union, the Royal Commission on the Economic Union and Development Prospects for Canada (MacDonald Commission) and the United Nations. Tremblay presided at the foundation of the North American Review of Economics and Finance and was associate editor of the Review L'Action nationale and the financial weekly Les Affaires.

•Rodrigue Tremblay was elected member of the National Assembly of Quebec for the Montreal riding of Gouin on November 15, 1976, as candidate of the Parti Québécois. He served as Minister of Industry and Trade in the Government of Quebec, from 1976 to 1979. He sponsored the sale of wine in Quebec's 12,000 private grocery stores. He resigned from the Lévesque Cabinet on September 19, 1979. He resumed his academic career on April 15, 1981.

Contents

[edit] Published books

  • The Role of International Financial Flows in the International Payments Mechanism, University Microfilms, 1967
  • La science économique, 1967
  • L'Économique, une introduction à l'analyse des problèmes économiques de toute société, 1969
  • Indépendance et marché commun Québec-USA, 1970
  • Africa and Monetary Integration, 1970
  • L'Économique, problèmes et exercices, 1970
  • La théorie du commerce international, 1971
  • La théorie monétaire internationale, 1972
  • Analyse microéconomique, 1975
  • L'Économie québécoise, 1976
  • L'Indépendance économique du Canada français, 1977
  • La 3e Option, 1979
  • Le Québec en crise, 1981
  • Économie et finances publiques, 1982
  • Issues in North American Economics and Finance, 1987
  • Le rôle des exportations dans la croissance et le développement économique, Institut de recherches politiques, 1990
  • Macroéconomique moderne, théories et réalités, 1992
  • Économie et finances publiques, 1997
  • Politique et Économie, 1998
  • Les Grand enjeux politiques et économiques du Québec, 1999
  • L'heure juste, 2001
  • Pourquoi Bush veut la guerre, 2003
  • Le nouvel empire américain, 2004
  • The New American Empire, 2004
  • The Code for Global Ethics, forthcoming

[edit] Contributions to economics

•Rodrigue Tremblay is a rare and versatile economist whose accomplishments touch many fields of economics and economic policy. He is known for his contributions in three areas of economics.

•First, there is Tremblay the communicator conveying economic thinking to the wider world. His many texbooks in Economics and Macroeconomics, written in French, were pathbreaking in the '70s, and stimulated studies in economics in many countries. They had the advantage of being clear, sharp and precise.

•Second, there are his contributions in the fields of international economics, economic development and economic cycles. He demonstrated the crucial role of short term capital movements in balance of payments adjustment (Can. Journal of Econ.-1968). His work on economic cycles innovated by identifying economic and political shocks as factors of economic instability (Rev. of North American Economics and Finance-1988). Tremblay then linked trade and development through economies of scale and increasing returns in his work on "Export-Led Growth" (Rev. of North American Economics and Finance-1991).

•Third, Dr. Tremblay's works in international trade and economic integration have been highly influential, especially in trade policy and monetary policy. In the early 70's, Tremblay influenced monetary policy in Africa as an adviser to the West African Monetary Union (see his book on Africa and Monetary integration, 1970). In 1988, Tremblay presided the committee of Canadian economists that argued successfully for the establishment of a Canada-U.S. free trade agreement and later, the North American Free Trade Area (NAFTA) between Canada, the U.S. and Mexico.

[edit] Contributions to politics

•Rodrigue Tremblay is a public intellectual who is known for his contributions to the understanding of international, Canadian and Quebec politics. His blog on world geopolitics is read in fifty countries and in seven languages. His book The New American Empire was published in English, in French under the title "Le nouvel empire américain" and in Turkish under the title of "Yeni Amerikan †mparatorlu›u". His political analyses have been published in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Globe and Mail and numerous French-language newspapers such as Le Devoir, La Presse (Canada), Le Soleil, and several other publications.

•In 1970, he was among the first economists to propose a North American Common Market with his book Indépendance et marché commun Québec–États-Unis. Nineteen years later, on January 1st, 1989, Canada and the United States entered into a North American Free Trade Area NAFTA which was enlarged to include Mexico in 1994. On the invitation of the Canadian government, he served as an arbiter on the Committee of Dispute Settlements of NAFTA, from 1989 to 1993. Previously, he had served as Minister of Industry and Commerce in the Government of Quebec, from 1976 to 1979. Also in 1979, he published a manifest for the reform of Canadian federalism entitled La 3e option (The 3rd Option) which envisaged a greater degree of political autonomy for the French-speaking province of Quebec. In 1987, when the federal government under Prime Minister Brian Mulroney introduced the Meech Lake Accord, it included some of Tremblay's ideas about political decentralization.

•From 1999 to 2004, Rodrigue Tremblay published four books about politics and geopolitics. The first, in 1999, (Les grands enjeux politiques et économiques du Québec) reproduced a series of articles published in the financial weekly Les Affaires. In 2002, Rodrigue Tremblay published a book of political philosophy entitled L’Heure Juste (The Way It Is). In 2003, his book entitled Pourquoi Bush veut la guerre, Religion, politique et pétrole dans les conflits internationaux, published more than one month before the event, dealt with the March 20, 2003 American-led invasion of Iraq.

•Many of professor Tremblay's works are available free on the Internet. They can be downloaded from the following site: http://classiques.uqac.ca/contemporains/tremblay_rodrigue/tremblay_rodrigue.html

[edit] Honors

  • Fellow, Université de Montréal, 1961
  • Woodrow Wilson Fellow, 1963
  • Ford International Fellow, Stanford University, 1964
  • Prize for excellence in teaching, Université de Montréal, 1998
  • Emeritus professor, 2002
  • Prix Condorcet, 2004

[edit] Partial Bibliography

[edit] A few quotations by Rodrigue Tremblay

  • "The American invasion of Iraq to gain control over its vast oil reserves could go down in history as the biggest planned heist of the 21st Century." 'The New American Empire', p. 206
  • "Interests ride on the white horses of ideas and ideologies."
  • "One of the greatest benefits of a well functioning democracy is its capacity to bring about change: change of government, change of policies, change in the distribution of income and wealth, ...etc., and avoid stagnation and immobilism."
  • "The world should take notice when someone with a fanatic mind and with powerful means, receives his marching orders from Heaven."
  • "Wars are cruel gimmicks designed to enrich the few and impoverish the many."
  • "It is not faith that produces freedom; knowledge brings freedom."
  • "An incompetent politician who surrounds himself with competent people can pull it off. However, if he is dumb enough to surround himself with like-minded people, failure becomes a certainty."
  • "The two biggest curses of humanity have been religions and wars, and both are often intertwined."
  • "An organized minority is most of the time stronger politically than a disorganized majority."
  • "People have invented gods to console themselves from their absence of control over life and death."
  • "On the political chessboard, those in the middle may have influence, but they rarely have power."
  • "Cemeteries are full of people with large pension funds."
  • "The fact that we do not have a good government does not mean that we are not governed."
  • "In our media-run world, people get the politicians that pundits and journalists deserve."
  • "A government bent on controlling the people can never gather enough information on its citizens."
  • "Hell on Earth is when one has too few things, ...or too many."
  • "It would be nothing less than scandalous for the United States, which was founded on humanistic and democratic principles, to attempt to replace the old empires of the past and to deny the fundamental democratic right of other peoples and other nations to self-determination."
  • "The 2003 Iraq war was launched because powerful interests in the United States, connected to the state of Israel, to the oil industry and to the Pentagon, wanted to take advantage of the political opportunity created by the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks to implement a plan of invasion of Iraq they had prepared years before."

[edit] Resources on Rodrigue Tremblay

[edit] External links