The archive.

That devaluing a currency must worsen a country's terms of trade was, in 1952, an assumption widely taken for granted, and this compact theoretical note, reprinted here, sets out to dismantle it. Haberler's thesis is deliberately asymmetrical: in the normal case, where depreciation improves the balance of payments, the terms of trade may move either way and cannot be predicted a priori; only in the perverse case, where the balance of payments worsens, must they deteriorate. Working through demand and supply curves priced in dollars, he shows that a depreciation lowers both export and import prices measured in dollars, so one cannot pair dearer imports with cheaper exports and infer a loss. Against Joan Robinson's presumption that supply elasticities generally exceed demand elasticities, he denies that any broad generalization holds.

We have, then, the result that export and import prices move in the same direction.

Democracy can endanger liberty—but does that make monarchy a safer alternative? In this review of Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s Liberty or Equality, Friedrich August von Hayek welcomes a Catholic monarchist’s challenge to democratic assumptions while resisting his conclusions. Hayek’s decisive question is whether threats to freedom arise from democratic institutions or from governmental aims, especially expanding control of economic life, that could prove equally destructive under autocracy. His measured disagreement shows how one can value an opponent’s historical learning without accepting his political prescription. The review also weighs religious explanations of Europe’s uneven experience with parliamentary government against the different democratic traditions those societies inherited. Its compact argument distinguishes peaceful political change from the protection of personal liberty, refusing to assume that either guarantees the other.

Correct economic theory can still miss the revealing question. In this brief 1952 review of Willi Graf’s dissertation on trade between market and centrally controlled economies, Josef Herbert Fürth praises Graf’s command of the literature but probes what his account leaves unexplained. The delay between Soviet political hostility toward Yugoslavia and changes in trade policy, Fürth suggests, could measure how quickly planners revise their arrangements. Communist cost accounting likewise needs explanation within the system it serves, not dismissal as a distortion of market conventions. These concrete objections give the review its interest: Fürth shows how institutional details can unsettle a neat opposition between planning and markets, while retaining a qualified recommendation of Graf’s comprehensive treatment.

What does practically effective economic training lose when specialization separates it from broader theoretical inquiry? In this 1952 study, Richard Kerschagl connects American university organization with the economics and business administration taught within it. Drawing on teaching experience and conversations with economists, he examines how departmental boundaries, case instruction, and well-funded research shape scholarly priorities. His continental European perspective is explicit: admiration for Mises and methodological breadth informs his criticism of theoretical fragmentation, yet he credits American mathematical methods and specialized research with genuine achievements. The comparison offers readers a concrete account of the institutional conditions behind intellectual differences—and a reciprocal prescription: Europeans need stronger mathematical training, while Americans need better access to European scholarship through languages and translation.

When observations contain measurement error, how can one determine whether their underlying systematic components obey independent linear relations? In this compact 1952 article, Gerhard Tintner makes the error covariance matrix the link between multicollinearity and weighted regression. For time series with smooth systematic components, he proposes estimating error covariances through successive differences, then assessing observed covariance against that noise structure. The same calculation supports both an estimate of the number of underlying relations and the coefficients needed to express them. Readers can examine a precise connection between error estimation and regression, together with its limits: errors must have constant covariances and no lag correlation, while the significance tests rely on normality and large-sample approximations rather than a known exact distribution.

A fitted relationship need not be the economic relationship an investigator seeks. In Econometrics, first published in 1952, Gerhard Tintner makes this gap between statistical calculation and economic interpretation a central teaching problem. Prices and quantities are jointly determined, so reversing a simple regression cannot by itself recover supply or demand; smoothing a time series can introduce dependence rather than merely uncover it. Tintner’s emphasis is statistical, but his tests of method remain tied to economic questions and worked applications. Readers can discover why assumptions about structure, measurement and temporal dependence change what an estimate warrants—and why describing past observations is not enough to justify a forecast. This reprint preserves a textbook concerned as much with the limits of quantitative inference as with its procedures.

Permission to dissent is not the same as an opportunity to be heard. In this review essay, republished as Economic Teaching at the Universities, Ludwig von Mises challenges the educational setting of Paul M. Sweezy’s volume on socialism: his objection is not that it was published, but that students receive no comparable, sustained criticism of its doctrines. An occasional visiting lecturer, he argues, cannot counter years of instruction. Writing as an outspoken defender of capitalism, Mises connects textbook selection and academic recruitment to the arguments students learn to regard as credible. The essay offers a concrete tension to examine: how can universities protect teachers’ freedom of conviction while ensuring that institutional authority does not substitute for intellectual contest?

High tax rates need not mean high tax burdens: opportunities to defer gains or escape taxation can matter more than the published rate. In this 1952 review of Henry C. Simons’s Federal Tax Reform, Walter Fröhlich examines the gap between fiscal principles and enforceable revenue laws. He endorses Simons’s case for comprehensive personal income taxation, emphasizing how selective realization of gains and losses favors some taxpayers over high-income wage earners. Yet he questions whether corporate taxation could be abolished without sacrificing necessary revenue. The review offers a compact encounter with Fröhlich’s combination of ethical commitment and technical scrutiny: fairness requires attention not only to rates, but also to accounting periods, income averaging, and the distinction between postponing a tax and avoiding it altogether.

Around 1700 the world's economies resembled one another far more than they would a century later; by the nineteenth century Western Europe had opened a vast productive gap over much of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. That gap, Mises contends in this lecture, sprang not from secret inventions or hoarded technique—engineers, manuals, and machines were available—but from institutions and expectations that made saving, accumulation, and long-term investment worthwhile. Nineteenth-century capital export, distinct from older colonial extraction, financed railways, mines, and ports where opportunity existed but local capital was scarce, rewarding investor and recipient alike. Against Rosa Luxemburg's theory of imperialism he insists capital flowed to serve consumers, not to conquer. His sharpest warning falls on confiscation, debt repudiation, and exchange control, which empty ownership of value without abolishing title—and, he cautions, may once more make war over raw materials thinkable.

Capitalism is not things; it is a mentality.

Reform could preserve papal sovereignty—or undermine the authority it was meant to strengthen. In this article, Friedrich Engel-Janosi uses diplomatic correspondence from Paris and Vienna to examine that dilemma during the first two years of Pius IX’s pontificate. His comparison complicates a simple opposition between reactionary Austria and liberal France: Metternich advocated administrative improvements, while the French envoy Pellegrino Rossi sought reforms that would secure rather than dissolve papal government. Their differences concerned timing, sovereign rights, and the political meaning of Italian nationality. Following advice through its reception, delay, and eventual displacement by revolution, Engel-Janosi shows how diplomatic influence depended on personal confidence—and why governing as both bishop and king presented difficulties that neither conservative prescription nor liberal optimism could settle.

Econometrics needs economics, mathematics, and statistics—but how should universities bring them together? In this 1952 report for UNESCO, Gerhard Tintner examines teaching arrangements across responding institutions in eight countries, finding that course titles alone cannot establish what students actually learn. His perspective combines an advocate’s concern for coherent quantitative training with a surveyor’s caution about incomplete evidence. Research institutes that unite teaching and investigation offer one promising model; specialized mathematics courses for economists expose the competing demands on students’ time. The questionnaire and institutional responses give readers concrete access to the courses, prerequisites, and research requirements behind Tintner’s comparisons. The report makes visible a practical tension: extending econometric education requires institutional coordination, while assessing its reach requires sharper definitions than this deliberately preliminary enquiry could provide.

Routinely misread as an excessive worker demand, profit-sharing in fact more often originates with employers, and Bayer refuses to judge it by tidy lists of pros and cons. Ranging across American, British, French, German, Austrian, and Soviet practice, he tests the Scanlon Plan, the Rucker Plan, the Duisburger Kupferhütte's division of results, and the statutory worker shares of Chile and Peru, then submits them all to economic theory. His sharpest distinction separates genuine entrepreneurial profit from monopoly rent: many schemes, he warns, merely redistribute rent, burdening society twice through restricted output and lost taxes. Real profit-sharing, tied to a base wage at least equal to the industry average, can smooth income during upswings and lift macroeconomic productivity, but only where trust, strong unions, and a policy of economic coordination already prevail.

So führen uns die Probleme der Gewinnbeteiligung hinein in die Gesamtzusammenhänge der Wirtschaft.

English translation: “Thus the problems of profit-sharing lead us into the overall interconnections of the economy.”