Alexander Gerschenkron

Alexander Gerschenkron (in Russian Александр Гершенкрон, * 1904 in Odessa, Russian Empire, now Ukraine, † 26 October 1978 in Cambridge, Massachusetts) was a Russian-born American Jewish economic historian and professor in Harvard, trained in the Austrian School of economics. Gerschenkron kept to his roots - in his economics, history and as a critic of Russian literature. His early work concentrated on development in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. In a celebrated 1947 article, he found the Gerschenkron effect (changing the base year for an index determines the growth rate of the index). His early work often pursued the statistical tricks of Soviet planners. Gerschenkron also advanced the linear stages theory of economic development which posits that economic development goes forward in fairly determined stages. However, he did accept that different periods exhibit different types of development: for instance, with the coexistence of advanced and backward countries, that the latter could skip several stages which the former had to go through by adopting their advanced technology. This was illustrated by the peculiar paths of industrialization of Meiji Japan and the Soviet Union. Gerschenkron postulated that the more backward an economy was at the outset of development the more certain conditions were likely to occur during growth, which he called "backwardness": consumption would be squeezed in favor of investment (i.e., savings) in countries starting from farther behind, and there was likely to be a greater reliance on banks, state entities, and other means of directing investment, among other conditions. He never exactly defined how 'backwardness' was to be measured, though he alluded to a northwest-to-southeast axis within Europe, with the United Kingdom at the most advanced extreme and the Balkan countries at the least developed extreme. Despite his roots in the Austrian school he criticized the "penny pinching, 'not-one-heller-more-policies'" of the prominent Austrian economist Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk when the latter was Austrian Minister of Finance and laid much of the blame for Austria's economic backwardness on Böhm-Bawerk's unwillingness to spend heavily on public works projects.**

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