Gottfried Haberler

Among other things, Haberler is credited with developing the theory of opportunity cost, which was pioneered by the Englishman John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) and the Austrian Friedrich von Wieser (1851–1926) further developed it.

Gottfried von Haberler (July 20, 1900 – May 6, 1995) was an Austrian-American economist.

He worked in particular on international trade.

One of his major contributions was reformulating the Ricardian idea of comparative advantage in a neoclassical framework, abandoning the labor theory of value for an opportunity cost concept.

Haberler was born in Austria-Hungary in 1900, and was educated in the Austrian School of economics, after which he served at the Economic and Financial Organization of the League of Nations.

In 1936 he moved to the United States, joining the economics department at Harvard University.

There he worked alongside Joseph Schumpeter.

Haberler's two major works were Theory of International Trade (1936) and Prosperity and Depression (1937).

Haberler's report seems to echo the report written by Raúl Prebisch in 1949 as well as Hans Singer in 1950.

He was President of the International Economic Association (1950–1953).

The report found that there was a decline in the terms of trade for primary producers, since 1955 commodity prices were said to have fallen by 5%, while industrial prices rose by 6%.

In 1957 the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade commissioned a report on the terms of trade for primary commodities, and Haberler was appointed Chairman.

However, when a second report by Prebisch or the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) came out in 1964, Haberler denounced it.

His particular disagreement was with the idea that there was a systematic long-term (secular) decline in the terms of trade.

In 1971, Haberler left Harvard to become a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

Haberler died from Parkinson's disease in 1995.