Alexander Gerschenkron

Alexander Gerschenkron ( born October 1, 1904 in Odessa, † 26 October 1978 in Cambridge, Massachusetts) was an economist and economic historian. He was around 25 years, Professor of Economics ( Economic History ) at Harvard University.

Life

Gerschenkron was born in 1904 in Odessa and migrated with his family in 1920 from Russia to Austria. He studied economics and political science at the University of Vienna, was there in 1928 Dr. rer. pol. doctorate, and married in the same year. By 1938 he was in Vienna in the private sector and later at various research institutes, most recently at the Austrian Institute for Business Cycle Research, worked. He also taught at the People's University.

After the annexation of Austria to the German Reich in 1938 Gerschenkron and his family emigrated to the United States, where he studied until 1944 at the University of California at Berkeley, but without being the holder of a regular point. From 1944 to 1948 he worked in the statistics and research department of the Federal Reserve System. In 1945 he became an American citizen in 1948, he was appointed to Harvard University, first as an associate professor, in 1951 as a full professor.

In the following years he received numerous honorary memberships and honorary positions, including serving as President of the Economic History Association.

Work

Gerschenkron mainly dealt with the process of industrialization, with its conditions, gradients and statistical measurement of economic variables for the 19th century.

About the limits of the economic history also known Gerschenkron was named after him by two phenomena that he described for the first time:

The Gerschenkron effect refers to the fact that the growth rate of a time series can be changed by moving the base year. In his early work Gerschenkron dealt several times with such statistical regularities. The background was a political one: The Soviet Union made ​​itself such phenomena regularly exploited in order to document the supposed functioning of the socialist economy to the outside.

Also named after Gerschenkron is the theory of " favorability of backwardness ". In his book Economic Backward Ness in Historical Perspective he showed in 1962 how a moderate backwardness in comparison to other nations may favor the rapid economic development of a country. This " Gerschenkronian backwardness " was ironically also tried to explain the amazing for those days, development of the USSR.

Publications

• Bread and Democracy in Germany. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, etc. 1943
• Economic Relations with the U.S.S.R. ( = Papers submitted to the Committee on International Economic Policy by its Advisory Committee on Economics. Vol. 5, ZDB - ID 1159910-8 ). Committee on International Economic Policy in cooperation with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, New York, NY, 1945.
• Economic Backward Ness in Historical Perspective. A Book of Essays. Belknap Press, Cambridge MA 1962.
• Continuity in History and Other Essays. Belknap Press, Cambridge MA 1968.
• Europe in the Russian Mirror. Four Lectures in Economic History. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge MA, 1970, ISBN 0-521-07721-4.