Nicholas Kaldor

Nicholas Kaldor
Born 12 May 1908
Budapest, Hungary
Died 30 September 1986 (aged 78)
Papworth Everard, Cambridgeshire, England
Nationality Great Britain
Field Political economy
School or tradition
 Post-Keynesian economics
Influences John Maynard Keynes , Gunnar Myrdal
Influenced Joan Robinson, Tony Thirlwall, Manmohan Singh
Contributions Kaldor–Hicks efficiency
Kaldor's growth laws
Circular Cumulative Causation

Nicholas Kaldor, Baron Kaldor (born Káldor Miklós) (12 May 1908 – 30 September 1986) was a Cambridge economist in the post-war period. He developed the "compensation" criteria called Kaldor–Hicks efficiency for welfare comparisons (1939), derived the cobweb model, and argued for certain regularities observable in economic growth, which are called Kaldor's growth laws.[1] Kaldor worked alongside Gunnar Myrdal to develop the key concept Circular Cumulative Causation, a multicausal approach where the core variables and their linkages are delineated. Both Myrdal and Kaldor examine circular relationships, where the interdependencies between factors are relatively strong, and where variables interlink in the determination of major processes. Gunnar Myrdal got the concept from Knut Wicksell and developed it alongside Nicholas Kaldor when they worked together at the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe. Myrdal concentrated on the social provisioning aspect of development, while Kaldor concentrated on demand-supply relationships to the manufacturing sector. Kaldor also coined the term "convenience yield"[2] related to commodity markets and the so-called theory of storage, which was initially developed by Holbrook Working.

Life

He was born Káldor Miklós in Budapest, and was educated there, as well as in Berlin, and at the London School of Economics, where he subsequently became a lecturer. After service in World War II, he held a senior post with the Economic Commission for Europe. From 1964, he was an advisor to the Labour government of the UK and also advised several other countries, producing some of the earliest memoranda regarding the creation of value added tax. Inter alia, Kaldor was considered, with his fellow-Hungarian Thomas Balogh, one of the intellectual authors of the 1964–70 Harold Wilson's government's short-lived Selective Employment Tax (SET) designed to tax employment in service sectors while subsidising employment in manufacturing. In 1966, he became professor of economics at the University of Cambridge. On 9 July 1974, Kaldor was made a life peer as Baron Kaldor, of Newnham in the City of Cambridge.[3]

Married to Clarissa Goldsmith, a prominent figure in Cambridge city life, he had four daughters, including Frances Stewart, Professor of Economic Development at the University of Oxford, and Mary Kaldor, Professor of Human Security at the London School of Economics.

He died in Papworth Everard, Cambridgeshire.

Works

See also

References

  1. ↑ Kaldor, N. (1967) Strategic Factors in Economic Development, New York, Ithaca
  2. ↑ Kaldor, N. (1939) "Speculation and economic stability, The Review of Economic Studies
  3. ↑ The London Gazette: no. 46352. p. 7918. 24 September 1974.

Further reading

External links