Fields of contemporary economics

Ever since 19th-century economists put forth their theories of international economics, the subject has consisted of two distinct but connected parts: (1) the “pure theory of international trade,” which seeks to account for the gains obtained from trade and to explain how these gains are distributed among countries, and (2) the “theory of balance-of-payments adjustments,” which analyzes the workings of the foreign exchange market, the effects of alterations in the exchange rate of a currency, and the relations between the balance of payments and level of economic activity.

In modern times, the Ricardian pure theory of international trade was reformulated by American economist Paul Samuelson, improving on the earlier work of two Swedish economists, Eli Heckscher and Bertil Ohlin. The so-called Heckscher-Ohlin theory explains the pattern of international trade as determined by the relative land, labour, and capital endowments of countries: a country will tend to have a relative cost advantage when producing goods that maximize the use of its relatively abundant factors of production (thus countries with cheap labour are best suited to export products that require significant amounts of labour).

This theory subsumes Ricardo’s law of comparative costs but goes beyond it in linking the pattern of trade to the economic structure of trading nations. It implies that foreign trade is a substitute for international movements of labour and capital, which raises the intriguing question of whether foreign trade may work to equalize the prices of all factors of production in all trading countries. Whatever the answer, the Heckscher-Ohlin theory provides a model for analyzing the effects of a change in trade on the industrial structures of economies and, in particular, on the distribution of income between factors of production. One early study of the Heckscher-Ohlin theory was carried out by Wassily Leontief, a Russian American economist. Leontief observed that the United States was relatively rich with capital. According to the theory, therefore, the United States should have been exporting capital-intensive goods while importing labour-intensive goods. His finding, that U.S. exports were relatively more labour-intensive and imports more capital intensive, became known as the Leontief Paradox because it disputed the Heckscher-Ohlin theory. Recent efforts in international economics have attempted to refine the Heckscher-Ohlin model and test it on a wider range of empirical evidence.

Like monetary and international economics, labour economics is an old economic speciality. Its raison d’être comes from the peculiarities of labour as a commodity. Unlike land or machinery, labour itself is not bought and sold; rather, its services are hired and rented out. But since people cannot be disassociated from their services, various nonmonetary considerations play a concealed role in the sale of labour services.

For many years labour economics was concerned solely with the demand side of the labour market. This one-sided view held that wages were determined by the “marginal productivity of labour”—that is, by the relationships of production and by consumer demand. If the supply of labour came into the picture at all, it was merely to allow for the presence of trade unions. Unions, it was believed, could only raise wages by limiting the supply of labour. Later in the 20th century, the supply side of the labour market attracted the attention of economists, which shifted from the individual worker to the household as a supplier of labour services. The increasing number of married women entering the labour force and the wide disparities and fluctuations observed in the rate that females participate in a labour force drew attention to the fact that an individual’s decision to supply labour is strongly related to the size, age structure, and asset holdings of the household to which he or she belongs.

Next, the concept of human capital—that people make capital investments in their children and in themselves in the form of education and training, that they seek better job opportunities, and that they are willing to migrate to other labour markets—has served as a unifying explanation of the diverse activities of households in labour markets. Capital theory has since become the dominant analytical tool of the labour economists, replacing or supplementing the traditional theory of consumer behaviour. The economics of training and education, the economics of information, the economics of migration, the economics of health, and the economics of poverty are some of the by-products of this new perspective. A field that was at one time regarded as rather cut-and-dried has taken on new vitality.

Labour economics, old or new, has always regarded the explanation of wages as its principal task, including the factors determining the general level of wages in an economy and the reasons for wage differentials between industries and occupations. There is no question that wages are influenced by trade unions, and the impact of union activities is of increased importance at a time when governments are concerned with unemployment statistics. Questions of whether prices are being pushed up by the labour unions (“cost push”) or pulled up by excess purchasing power (“demand pull”) have become the issues in the larger debate on inflation—a controversy that is directly related to the debates in monetary economics mentioned earlier.

The principal concerns of industrial organization are the structure of markets, public policy toward monopoly, the regulation of public utilities, and the economics of technical change. The monopoly problem, or, more precisely, the problem of the maintenance of competition, does not fit well into the received body of economic thought. Economics started out, after all, as the theory of competitive enterprise, and even today its most impressive theorems require the assumption of numerous small firms, each having a negligible influence on price. Yet, as noted earlier, contemporary market structures tend toward oligopoly—competition among the few—with some industries dominated by firms so large their annual sales volume exceeds the national income of the smaller European countries. It is tempting to conclude that oligopoly is deleterious to economic welfare on the ground that it leads to the misallocation of resources. But some economists, notably Schumpeter, have argued that economic growth and technical progress are achieved not through free competition but by the enlargement of firms and the destruction of competition. According to this view, the giant firms compete not in price but in successful innovation, and this kind of competition has proved more effective for economic progress than the more traditional price competition.

This thesis makes somewhat less compelling the merits of “trust busting,” largely taken for granted since the administration of U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt first set about curbing the concentration of corporate power in the early 20th century. Instead, it points the way for a consideration of competition that seeks to attain the greatest benefit for society. For example, if four or five large firms in an oligopolistic industry compete on the basis of product quality, research, technology, or merchandising, the performance of the entire industry may well be more satisfactory than if it were reorganized into a price-competitive industry. But if the four or five giants compete only in sales promotion techniques, the outcome will likely be less favourable for society. One cannot, therefore, draw facile conclusions about the competitive results of different market structures.

Much uncertainty in the economic discussion of policies towards big business stems from the lack of a general theory of oligopoly. Perhaps a loose criterion for judging the desirability of different market structures is American economist William Baumol’s concept of “contestable markets”: if a market is easy to enter and to exit, it is “contestable” and hence workably competitive.

Farming has long provided economists with their favourite example of a perfectly competitive industry. However, given the level of government regulation of and support for agriculture in most countries, farming also provides striking examples of the effects of price controls, income supports, output ceilings, and marketing cartels. Not surprisingly, agricultural economics commands attention wherever governments wish to stimulate farming or to protect farmers—which is to say everywhere.

Agricultural economists generally have been closer to their subject matter than other economists. In consequence, more is known about the technology of agriculture, the nature of farming costs, and the demand for agricultural goods than is known about any other industry. Thus the field of agricultural economics offers a rich literature on the basics of economic study, such as estimating a production function or plotting a demand curve.

One of the most remarkable new developments is the growth of a discipline combining legal and economic concerns. Its origins in the 1970s are almost wholly due to the unintended effects of two articles by Ronald Coase, a British economist specializing in industrial organization. Before emigrating to the United States in 1950, Coase published The Nature of the Firm (1937), which was the first paper to pose a seemingly innocent question: Why are there firms at all—why not a collection of independent producers and merchants supplying whatever is called for in the market? Firms are, after all, nonmarket administrative organizations. Coase determined that firms spring up to minimize the “transaction costs” of marketing—namely, the costs of drawing up contracts and monitoring their implementation. Coase’s idea—that all economic transactions are in fact explicit or implicit contracts and hence that the role of the law in enforcing contracts is crucial to the operations of a market economy—was soon seen as a revelation. Economic institutions (such as corporations) came to be viewed as social devices for reducing transaction costs.

Coase contributed yet another central tenet of law and economics as a unified field of study in his paper The Problem of Social Cost (1960). Here he argued that, except for transaction costs, not only could private deals between voluntary agents always accommodate market failures but that “government failures” (that is, those caused by government intervention) were as deleterious as market failures, if not more so. As Coase stated in the paper,

Direct governmental regulation will not necessarily give better results than leaving the problem to be solved by the market or firm. But equally, there is no reason why on occasion such governmental administrative regulation should not lead to an improvement in economic efficiency.

In other words, transaction costs were central to the problem of social welfare, and markets were inherently more efficient than any social intervention devised by governments. Up to this point the accepted neoclassical welfare economics had promoted “perfect competition” as the best of all possible economic worlds. This theoretical market structure comprised a world of many small firms whose product prices were determined by the sum of all their output decisions in relation to the independent demand of consumers. This perfect condition, however, depended on increasing returns to scale which allow firms to cut costs as their businesses expand. The concept of perfect competition therefore assumed that one or more of the small firms must fail. This argument has been known ever since as the Coase theorem, and “The Problem of Social Cost” produced not just law and economics as a speciality study in economics but led to the new institutionalism in industrial organization referred to earlier.

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Joseph E. Stiglitz, 2010.

© Geraint Lewis—REX/Shutterstock.com

Toward the end of the 20th century, information economics became an increasingly important specialization. It is almost wholly the legacy of a single article entitled The Market for ‘Lemons’: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism by George Akerlof (1970). Akerlof asserted that the market for secondhand cars is one in which sellers know much more than buyers about the quality of the product being sold, implying that only the worst cars—“lemons”—reach the secondhand car market. As a result, secondhand-car dealers are compelled to offer guarantees as a means of increasing their customers’ confidence. A buyer who knows more about a transaction (i.e., the quality of the secondhand car) will be willing to pay more than a buyer who is provided less information about a transaction. For any product or service, therefore, “asymmetric information” (one party to a transaction knowing more than another) can result in “missing markets,” or the absence of a marketable transaction. The potency of this idea and its relevance to all sorts of economic behaviour captivated many economists, leading some to connect it with contract theory and principal-agency theory (concerning situations in which a principal hires an agent to carry out instructions but then has to monitor the agent’s performance, as in franchising a business). Two or three decades after Akerlof’s groundbreaking work, it was abundantly clear that information economics flowed from his underlying idea of asymmetric information, and in 2001 Akerlof, Joseph Stiglitz, and Michael Spence were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for their work in this area.