Bertil Gotthard Ohlin () (23 April 1899 – 3 August 1979) was a Swedish economist and politician. He was a professor of economics at the Stockholm School of Economics from 1929 to 1965. He was also leader of the People's Party, a social-liberal party which at the time was the largest party in opposition to the governing Social Democratic Party, from 1944 to 1967. He served briefly as Minister of Commerce and Industry from 1944 to 1945 in the Swedish coalition government during World War II. He was President of the Nordic Council in 1959 and 1964.
Ohlin's name lives on in one of the standard mathematical models of international free trade, the Heckscher–Ohlin model, which he developed together with Eli Heckscher. He was jointly awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1977 together with the British economist James Meade "for their pathbreaking contribution to the theory of international trade and international capital movements".
Biography
Bertil Ohlin was raised in Klippan, Scania with seven siblings, where his father Elis was a civil servant and bailiff. His mother Ingeborg influenced him with her left-liberal views on the society, with Nordic partnership and Karl Staaff as her role model. He received his B.A. from Lund University 1917 at the age of 18 and his MSc. from Stockholm School of Economics in 1919.
He obtained an M.A. from Harvard University in 1923 and his doctorate from Stockholm University a year after in 1924 at the age of 25. He also worked as an outside expert for the Economic and Financial Organization of the League of Nations, together with Oskar Morgenstern and Jacques Rueff, supporting the EFO's work on economic depressions in the late 1930s.
Ohlin was party leader of the liberal Liberal People's Party from 1944 to 1967, the main opposition party to the Social Democrat Governments of the era, and from 1944 to 1945 was Minister of Commerce and Industry in the wartime government. His daughter Anne Wibble, representing the same party, served as Minister for Finance from 1991 to 1994.
Heckscher–Ohlin theorem
In 1933, Ohlin published Interregional and International Trade. Ohlin built in it an economic theory of international trade from earlier work by Heckscher and his own doctoral thesis.
See also
- Contributions to liberal theory
- Ohlin Report (1956)
Significant publications
thumb|Interregional and international trade, 1933
- The German Reparations Problem, 1930
- The Cause and Phases of the World Economic Depression. Report presented to the Assembly of the League of Nations Geneva: Secretariat of the League of Nations; 1931.
- Interregional and International Trade, 1933
- Mechanisms and Objectives of Exchange Controls, 1937
- The Problem of Employment Stabilisation, 1950. Columbia University Press.
Sources
- Encyclopædia Britannica Online "International trade"
- NobelPrize.org "Why Trade?"
- Chapter 60 The Heckscher–Ohlin (Factor Proportions) Model