The Paretian Tradition During the Interwar Period

The years in-between the two World Wars were a crucial period for the building of economic dynamics as an autonomous field. Different competing research programs arose at international level. Great progress was achieved by studies on the business cycle, with the first statistical applications. Outside the theory of the business cycle, a significant line of inquiry was that pursued at the end of the 1930s by Hicks and Samuelson. This period also saw the formulation of another approach to formal economic dynamics which in the 1930s represented the frontier of research from the analytical point of view. It was an approach which set the notion of equilibrium at the basis of dynamics, exactly as in the case of statics, thus leading to the definition of a dynamic equilibrium approach. The aim of this volume is to take into consideration this original research field sparked from Pareto’s works and initially developed during the 1920s in the United States by two American mathematicians, G. Evans and C. Ross.