GREAT ECONOMIC THINKER OF THE 20TH CENTURY

Scientific review article
Autor: Svetlana Pantelić
JEL: B31, B52, D70, O43

Summary: Douglass North and Robert Fogel won the 1993 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for having renewed research in economic history by applying economic theory and quantitative methods in order to explain economic and institutional change. Douglass North was born in 1920 in Cambridge, Massachusetts (USA). He graduated from the University of California at Berkeley. He studied political science, philosophy and economics, and gained his PhD at the University of Washington. In the 1960s he launched an undergraduate program for economic history studies at the University of Washington in Seattle, where he taught as a professor until 1983, when he moved to Washington University in St. Louis. The shift to another university turned out to be a felicitous move given that there he met a group of young political scientists and economists who were attempting to develop new models of political economy. With their help, he established the Center in Political Economy, which continued to be a creative research center. North is one of the most significant economists in the 20th century, his contribution to the economic thought being just as great in the 21st century.

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