Current Literature
An Outline of International Price Theories
By Chi-Yuen Wu This modestly titled study (Routledge, 15s.) will be a genuine and solid asset to all students of economics, and particularly, though by no means exclusively, to those especi- ally interested in the foundations of international trade theory on its monetary side. Dr. Wu offers to his readers some- thing more than a straightforward historical record, useful as that in itself would have been ; though he lays no claim to exhaustiveness, he achieves an analysis of the intermingling intellectual comporients which have gone to make up economic theory in this field from its mediaeval origins to the present day. The continuity of that evolution is striking, in spite of the great changes both in the theories and the practical advice of the economists concerned. Dr. Wu misses few opportunities of drawing the reader's attention to the essentially similar content of controversies waged centuries apart and in com- pletely different phraseology. It is fascinating to see the argu- ments of the early mercantilists, for instance, translated into modern terms and shown as correct or incorrect analyses—as the occasion may be—of particular cases due to be incor- porated later in the general body of theory ; or to watch this process of incorporation itself taking place as one writer after another modifies, contradicts, expands, or synthesises the con- clusions of his predecessors. In the later chapters, dealing with post-War theoretical developments and the present state of international price theory, there is the additional interest of seeing the closer and closer incorporation of international price theory itself into the general body of economics—the counter- part, as Professor Robbins points out in his Preface,, of the increasing fruitfulness in the field of general economics of the concepts first• evolved to deal with. the supposedly special case of international trade. Dr. Wu's book stands firmly on its own merits. When one considers that, to quote the Preface, " the main sections were drafted under the shadow of impending catastrophe and the final version has been corrected amid the distractions of actual warfare," those merits appear all the more remarkable.
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