Ohlin, Bertil

Ohlin, Bertil (bĕr`tĭl ō`lĭn), 1899–1979, Swedish economist, b. Klippan. A professor at several Swedish universities, he wrote the influential Interregional and International Trade (1933, rev. ed. 1967), in which he developed the Heckscher-Ohlin principle based on the earlier (1919) work of Eli Heckscher. The theory argues that the types of commodities a nation exports depends entirely on the nation's endowment of resources. His work won him the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1977.

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Ohlin, Bertil 

Born Apr. 23, 1899, in Klippan. Swedish economist and political figure.

Ohlin was a professor at both the University of Stockholm and the University of Copenhagen from 1924 to 1929 and at the Stockholm School of Economics from 1929 to 1965. He served as the minister of commerce of Sweden in 1944 and 1945 and represented Sweden in the Council of Europe from 1949 to 1960 and in 1969 and 1970 and in the Nordic Council from 1955 to 1970. He was the chairman of the bourgeois People’s (Liberal) Party between 1944 and 1967.

A member of the Stockholm school of bourgeois political economy, Ohlin shares the basic principles of J. M. Keynes and has proposed that Keynesian theory be improved by distinguishing between economic processes of the past and the future. He advocates a particular combination of free competition, monopoly, and state regulation wherein the bourgeois government can create favorable conditions for private enterprise and monopolies that “do not abuse their position.” This conception, which includes elements of neo-Keynesianism and neoliberalism, together with antimonopolistic demagogy and an open apology for monopolies, is of a decidedly antisocialist nature. Ohlin suggested the Heckscher-Ohlin model, according to which an equilibrium of prices of the factors of production in various countries—and, thus, a general economic equilibrium—is supposedly achieved under conditions of free trade. This theory, which became very popular among bourgeois economists, was developed by P. Samuelson, J. Tinbergen, and others. It is used to justify unequivalent exchange in international capitalist trade and discrimination against the developing countries.

WORKS

Fri eller dirigerad ekonomi? Stockholm, 1936.
“Metodfrågor inom den dynamiska teorien.” Ekonomisk tidskrift, 1941, vol. 43, no. 4.
Utrikeshandel och Handelspolitik, 5th ed. Stockholm, 1953.
Liberal utmaning, 2nd ed. Stockholm, 1963.
Sträng, Inflationen och skatten. Stockholm, 1970.

REFERENCES

Zhikharevich, S. G. Stokgol’mskaia shkola burzhuaznoipoliticheskoi ekonomii. Tartu, 1964.
Seligmen, B. Osnovnye techeniia sovremennoi ekonomicheskoi mysli. Moscow, 1968. (Translated from English.)
Fomin, B. S. Ekonometricheskie teorii i modeli mezhdunarodnykh ekonomicheskikh otnoshenii, Moscow, 1970.
Wennås, O. Ohlin: Folkpartiet och socialliberalismen. Lund, 1970.

S. G. ZHIKHAREVICH