The archive.

Japan’s industrial recovery during the world depression posed a paradox: expanding production and exports did not bring comparable gains in workers’ incomes. In this 1937 article, Emil Lederer looks beyond currency depreciation to explain how agricultural distress, family workshops, weak unions, and industrial rationalization combined to keep labor costs low as productivity rose. His analysis connects the collapse of silk-export earnings to the need for greater manufactured exports—and greater imports of raw materials. Success thus deepened dependence on foreign markets just as protectionism restricted access to them. Read against Japan’s imperial ambitions, the article offers a concrete distinction between territorial power and economic security: Lederer argues that domination of Manchukuo did not solve the trading constraints that helped drive expansion.

Thus the Japanese experience with Manchukuo again proves the rule that political domination as such does not guarantee an improvement in economic relations.

Updating French cheque law did not mean updating every part of a banking treatise. In this brief 1937 review, Helene Lieser precisely marks the scope of Joseph Hamel’s supplement: it presents changes to French law, now based on the Geneva Conventions of 1931, while leaving revision of the international cheque-law section to a further edition. Her notice offers a useful distinction between what the supplement supplies and what remains outstanding, rather than an assessment of Hamel’s legal interpretations.

For the fiftieth-anniversary volume of the Revue d'Economie Politique, Strigl described how economics was actually taught in the universities of his own Vienna — here in the French translation prepared for that Paris series. Long a marginal subject lodged within the law faculties and pushed late in the curriculum, economics had, he explains, been reduced for many students to an examination hurdle despite teaching of the first rank in the Austrian School tradition. He works through the old regulations, the 1935 reform that lengthened legal study and introduced early exercises in basic economic concepts, and the little-used Staatswissenschaft doctorate, before turning to the technical schools and the Austrian Institute for Business Cycle Research. His closing claim is plain: the worldwide reputation of the Austrian School is itself the best evidence for the quality of that teaching.

Pendant longtemps, l'enseignement économique, rattaché exclusivement aux facultés de droit, n'occupait, dans les programmes d'enseignement juridique, qu'une place peu saillante.

English translation: “For a long time, economic instruction, attached exclusively to the faculties of law, occupied only a minor place in the programs of legal education.”

Can a country control its money without disrupting the trade and investment that connect it to others? In Monetary Nationalism and International Stability, first published in 1937 and reprinted here in 1989, Friedrich August von Hayek challenges the promise of monetary independence without simply defending the historical gold standard. His distinctive move is to follow changes in purchasing power through particular people, industries and banks rather than treat national price averages as sufficient explanations. National reserve arrangements, he argues, can turn ordinary shifts in demand into credit contractions that burden investment. Readers can discover why exchange-rate depreciation may relocate rather than remove adjustment costs—and why Hayek’s case for international money entails criticism of existing banking institutions, not merely a call to restore gold.

A market with many sellers need not exhibit perfect competition, and product differentiation need not secure lasting excess profits. In this 1937 article, Fritz Machlup separates distinctions that familiar market labels can obscure. His starting point is the seller’s calculation: does a proposed price change require anticipating rivals’ reactions, or only buyers’ responses? This perspective places monopoly alongside competitive positions in one respect, while distinguishing both from strategically interdependent oligopoly. Machlup then separates the shape of perceived demand from the conditions under which entry and adjustment erode abnormal returns. The result gives readers a precise way to examine why similar short-run pricing positions may have different futures—and why a threat of entry can restrain one seller while a temporary advantage encourages another to exploit it.

A rising price may prompt buyers to purchase now—or to wait for an expected reversal. In this 1937 article, Gerhard Tintner makes that ambiguity central to monopoly analysis: demand responds not only to the current price but also to its movement over time. His distinctive aim is to connect the mathematical optimization of a price path with familiar economic concepts, especially elasticities, revenues, and marginal costs. Readers can follow how static monopoly conditions change when the seller maximizes profit across an interval rather than at a single moment. Equally revealing is Tintner’s restraint: extending demand to higher price derivatives yields more general equations, but their economic meaning becomes less clear. The article asks how far mathematical generalization can go while remaining economically intelligible.

A productive service is never simply a thing but a quantity applied over an interval, and from that observation Machlup builds a patient dismantling of loose talk about the marginal product. Labour-hours, acre-seasons, machine-days: each unit depends on divisibility, and highly qualified labour may be hired by the minute at one extreme or by five-year contract at the other. 'Efficiency units' tempt the theorist into circularity, since a theory meant to explain factor prices cannot first define factor quantities by those prices. What matters for a firm's hiring, he argues, is neither extra bushels nor their value at an unchanged price, but an expected, dated, discounted money net product framed by a definite competitive situation — marginal productivity rendered conditional rather than emptied of meaning.

This third dimension is, then, the time interval between the application of any productive service, say a labor-hour, and the enjoyment of its product.

Clarity and ease of consultation are Helene Lieser’s criteria in this brief 1937 review of the first volume of Otto Wittschieben’s introduction to Austrian financial law. She recommends a guide intended for students also to practitioners without specialist tax expertise. Her notice draws attention to the volume’s institutional scope: budgets, financial administration and public debt precede the systematic treatment of tax legislation reserved for volume two. It offers a compact assessment of whom the book serves and why its organization matters.

Does industrial monopoly follow inevitably from efficient production, or from legal arrangements and deliberate attempts to control prices? In this 1937 review of Arthur Robert Burns’s The Decline of Competition, Frank Albert Fetter tests the claim of inevitability against Burns’s own evidence. His crucial distinction is between a large, efficient plant and a firm that acquires many plants to gain market power: financial concentration need not improve production. Fetter values Burns’s account of industrial practices but challenges the move from documenting monopoly to accepting it as unavoidable. His criticism sharpens when Burns proposes state control: why should officials deemed unable to preserve competition prove capable of administering concentrated industry? The review connects precise questions of industrial organization with the competence and accountability of economic government.

An economy may return to equilibrium after a disturbance—but what makes it transform itself? In this 1937 preface to the Japanese edition of his Theory of Economic Development, Schumpeter revisits that question without simply restating the book. He separates his debt to Walras’s equilibrium analysis from his rejection of an economy that changes only under external pressure, and identifies an affinity with Marx’s vision of internally generated economic evolution while resisting identification with Marx’s theory. His response to newer mathematical accounts of business cycles sharpens the issue: explaining how fluctuations propagate does not establish what initiates them. This short retrospective shows why Schumpeter welcomed improved analytical tools yet maintained that innovation required a distinct causal explanation.

Democracy must defend the freedoms that its opponents can use to dismantle it—but when does self-defense become domination? In this 1937 essay, Emil Lederer treats public opinion not simply as newspaper commentary or electoral preference, but as something formed through families, schools, associations, and everyday participation. His challenge to the marketplace of ideas is concrete: unequal funding, deliberate falsehoods, and emotional manipulation can make formally free competition anything but fair. Education and disclosure therefore matter alongside legal safeguards. Yet Lederer also confronts the danger that leaders empowered to protect liberty may become its suppressors. The essay offers a demanding account of democratic citizenship while leaving readers with an unresolved practical question: how to resist movements bent on abolishing freedom without corrupting the institutions defending it.

Citizens are not born, they are made.

Does capital mean a company’s assets, its shareholders’ wealth, or the cost of goods used in production? In this 1937 article, reprinted in 1977, Frank Albert Fetter argues that economics has handed accounting a vocabulary unable to keep these distinctions clear. His alternative treats capital as the present monetary value of investors’ rights to future income, not as a collection of physical objects. This makes ownership and valuation inseparable: corporations own assets, while shareholders own capital; enterprises earn profits, while individuals receive income. Fetter’s respect for accountants’ practical difficulties sharpens his challenge to historical cost. Readers can discover why apparently verbal disagreements affect the interpretation of balance sheets—and why recording past expenditure cannot, in his view, settle the question of present worth.