A History of Canadian Economic Thought.

• Author: Moggridge, D.E.

The last full-scale history of economic thought in Canada was Craufurd Goodwin's Canadian Economic Thought: The Political Economy of a Developing Nation, 1814-1914 (1961). The most famous of several surveys of post-war developments was Harry Johnson's 'Canadian Contributions to the Discipline of Economics since 1945,' which appeared in the first issue of the Canadian Journal of Economics in 1968. There is thus a case for another study and for this reason Robin Neill's contribution to Mark Blaug's Routledge series, which has already seen studies of Australia, Japan and Sweden ought to be welcomed.

In twelve chapters, and an excessively brief, two page conclusion, Neill takes his reader through his subject, providing enough economic history to give the non-Canadian reader some historical context. One of the chapters is introductory, four (two on the francophone literature of Quebec and one each on specific historical concerns of the Maritimes and the West) are on what might be called the economics of separate regions. For the rest, the coverage is predominantly of English-speaking Canada.

As any potential reader of such a survey might guess, the first problem faced by the compiler is one of definition. Neill casts his net on the following principle:

We have defined the economics of Canada to be what people thought was happening, or should have been happening in the economic activities of the country. It is made up of description, analysis and policy proposals. It is distinctive because of the specific environment of economic activity with which it deals.

For much of the period, this definition makes little difference to the coverage of the book, but with the growing professionalisation and internationalisation of the subject, it does result in some odd choices. It means that, unless Neill can assure himself that the analysis grew out of Canadian problems, contributions to pure theory by Canadian economists go for nought. Canadian contributions to applied economics (when Neill discovers them, and he ignores such things as the work of Bodkin, Sawyer and others on large-scale econometric models) do not count unless they deal with Canadian problems. Hence an odd and unbalanced discussion of the work of Harry Johnson and the ignoring of the contributions of 26 out of the 43 resident Canadian economists, living or dead, included by Mark Blaug in the second edition of his Who's Who in Economics (an even larger number, if Harry Johnson's broader...