Colin Danby publishes two articles on the history of political economy


Meade demonstrating the two-country machine to his seminar in 1952. Source: Meade Collection, LSE Library.

Meade demonstrating the two-country machine to his seminar in 1952

IAS faculty member Colin Danby has published two new articles on development economics. The first is a biographical article on the Mexican economist Juan Noyola (1922-1962) for the New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, online.

Juan Noyola (1922–1962) was a Mexican economist who spent most of his short career on the staff of the United Nations Economics Commission for Latin America (ECLA), where he worked closely with Celso Furtado. He is best known for his 1956 article on Latin American inflation, which introduced a category of “propagating mechanisms” as distinct from “basic pressures.” Noyola argued throughout his career that Latin American economies required specific historical and institutional analyses, rather than abstract and universal theories.

Danby also published "Meade, Phillips, and the Two-Country Model," scheduled for the next issue (53:4) of the journal History of Political Economy but available now as an advance publication.

James Meade played an important role in the 1951 development of the “Mark II” Newlyn-Phillips machine, including making it fit for connection to a mirror-image machine so that policy interactions between two countries could be demonstrated. In 1952 Phillips built, for Meade, a “foreign exchange market” to link two machines. This article reconstructs the linking device from archival evidence, and places the resulting two- country model in the context of Meade’s thought.