Bertil Gotthard Ohlin (Swedish: [ˈbæ̌ʈːɪl ʊˈliːn]) (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".
Contents
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. In 1925, he became a professor at the University of Copenhagen. In 1929, he debated with John Maynard Keynes and contradicted the latter's view on the consequences of the heavy war reparations payments imposed on Germany. (Keynes predicted a war caused by the burden of debt, but Ohlin thought that Germany could afford the reparations.) The debate was important in the modern theory of unilateral international payments. In 1930, Ohlin succeeded Eli Heckscher, his teacher, as a professor of economics, at the Stockholm School of Economics.