SIMONDE DE SISMONDI, Jean Charles Léonard.

£3,750 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

De la richesse commerciale, First edition, presentation copy, inscribed in a secretarial hand on the half-title of each volume, "de la part de l'auteur". The first work on political economy by the Swiss historian and economist, De la richesse commerciale "was intended as a systematic exposition of the ideas of Adam Smith. Yet in it Sismondi also pointed out that he was presenting 'an absolutely new' way of looking at aggregate output changes. Crude arithmetic examples depicted output during a given year as a function of investment during a previous year, and showed how a closed economy differed from an economy with international trade, and how the latter differed when there was an export surplus and an import surplus" (New Palgrave).

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