Potential Gains from and Obstacles to International Policy Co-ordination

Abstract

I first came across Robert’s name when, as a graduate student at Harvard in the immediate post-war years, I was assigned to read Monopolistic Competition and General Equilibrium Theory. I was deeply impressed then with its lucidity and elegance in bridging the gap between the Anglo-Saxon and the Continental approaches to market equilibrium and in clarifying the whole subject of imperfect competition. Even in that work — his Ph.D. thesis at Harvard — Robert’s propensity to reform was evident. So was his ability to write unusual prefaces. Here was a man with a mind and a heart. I first met and came to know Robert in the early 1950s when I was at the Federal Reserve Board and he was commuting from Yale to Washington as a consultant to Arthur Burns’ Council of Economic Advisers. Over the years since then, we have attended many meetings together and I have observed him as an incisive analyst and theorist, a prolific author, and an indefatigable reformer of international monetary arrangements.