Robert Mandell biography. Robert Mundell – “godfather” of the European Union

Robert Mandell was born in 1932 in the city of Kingston, in the south of the Canadian province of Ontario. Robert graduated from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, after which he graduated from the University of Washington in Seattle. He received his Doctor of Science degree in economics in 1956 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He also studied at the London School of Economics for several years.

Since 1974, Mandell worked at Columbia University, where in 2001 he received the highest title of professor of economics.

He got his first job at Stanford University, where he worked as an economics teacher. And after that he worked at Johns Hopkins University.

In 1961, Mundell decided to try his hand at the International Monetary Fund, where he worked until 1966.

Until 1971, he taught at the University of Chicago, and after that at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva; There he spent several years, also holding the position of professor of economics.

During this time, Mundell began working on the analysis of monetary and fiscal policies under various exchange rate regimes, and also began analyzing optimal currency areas. For his lecture "A Reconsideration of the Twentieth Century" he received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1999. At that time he was already 67 years old.

After this, Robert Mundell began working as an economic adviser to the United Nations Organization, the World Bank, the European Commission and the United States Department of the Treasury. Robert Mundell is also an economic adviser to Canada and other countries.

In 1971, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship in the amount of $43,000.

In 1922, Mandell received a second doctorate, this time from the University of Paris. He has also received honorary professorships from the Brookings Institution, the University of Chicago, the University of Southern California, McGill University, the University of Pennsylvania, the Bologna Center, Renmin University of China, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The Zhongguancun County University in Beijing was named after him.

Robert's face often appeared on television screens. The first time this happened was in October 2002, on David Letterman's Late Show with David Letterman on CBS. In the program, Robert discussed 10 changes in his life that occurred after receiving the Nobel Prize (Ways My Life has Changed Since Winning the Nobel Prize). In 2004, he appeared on television several more times, but only in humorous programs.

In September 2004, Robert appeared on screen to read several pages from Paris Hilton's memoirs.

He was also the guest of honor at the Game Five of the 2010 World Chess Championshi and made the traditional first move in the duel between Viswanathan Anand and Veselin Topalov.

On June 5, 2009, Robert Mundell visited Russia. He participated in the annual international economic forum held in St. Petersburg.

Mundell is the author of two books: The International Monetary System: Conflict and Reform, published in 1965, and Monetary Theory: Interest , Inflation and Growth in the World Economy), which was published in 1971.

(born 1932)
Nobel Prize in Economics 1999

American economist Robert A. Mundell was born in Canada. After completing his studies at the University of British Columbia and the University of Washington, he continued his graduate studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the London School of Economics (LSE). In 1956, he defended his PhD thesis at MIT on the migration of capital in world markets. The next academic year, 1956/1957, M. interned at the University of Chicago, being its scholarship holder in the specialty “political economy”. He taught for several years at Stanford University and at the Johns Hopkins Bologna Center of Advanced International Studies before joining the research department of the International Monetary Fund in 1961. M. remained his employee until 1963. In the second half of the 1960s. he worked at the University of Chicago (1966-1971) and was one of its intellectual leaders. At the same time, he was the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Political Economy.
For ten years (1965-1975) as a visiting professor, M. lectured every summer on the world economy to students at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva. Since 1974, M. has been a professor at the Department of Economics at Columbia University in New York. In 1997-1998 he is a professor of economics at the Johns Hopkins Bologna Center of the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies.
M. is the author of more than 40 books, 200 articles, several dozen reports of international and governmental organizations on problems of the world economy, monetary policy and fiscal policy, inflation, economic growth, and the history of the international monetary system. His works belong to the field of fundamental science and are distinguished by their innovative approach, non-standard formulation of problems and practical significance. More than 30 years ago, M.'s undoubted scientific intuition allowed him to quite accurately predict the development trends of the international currency market and the international capital market. He became truly famous for his development of one of the first projects to create a single European currency. M. is also known as the author of the theory of optimal currency areas.
M. laid the foundations for the analysis of monetary and budget policy, or the so-called stabilization policy, in an open economy in a number of his articles published in the early 60s. and reprinted in his book “International Economics” (1968). In them, he formulated the starting points of the theory that underlies modern approaches to stabilization monetary and fiscal policies in an open economy. His research into monetary dynamics and optimal currency areas laid a solid foundation for several subsequent generations of researchers. M.'s ideas occupy a central place in international macroeconomics today.
In the early 60s. in a number of articles M. raised the question of what impact monetary and fiscal policies have on the integration of international capital markets. He tried to determine whether this influence depended on the existing monetary system in the country, namely, on whether the country fixed the value of its currency or allowed it to fluctuate freely. At the same time, in the article “The Theory of Optimum Currency Areas” (“A Theory of Optimum Currency Areas”, 1961), M. posed the question, which seemed absurd at the time, of whether a country should have only its own currency or whether it is theoretically and practically conceivable a situation where it is beneficial for an entire region to give up its monetary sovereignty in favor of a common currency.
M.'s approaches to these problems were undoubtedly influenced by the fact that in the 50s. in his homeland - Canada - a more liberal exchange rate regime was introduced compared to other countries, including the United States, allowing free fluctuation of the national currency against the US dollar, and restrictions on the migration of capital and labor began to be eased. In his article, M. showed the undoubted benefits that the presence of a common currency provides for a vast economic region. These included savings in transaction costs that arise beyond the price of trading goods and services, as well as less uncertainty in relative prices. The main disadvantage of a common currency was the difficulty of maintaining employment in a situation where changes in demand or other, in M.'s terminology, “asymmetric shocks” of economic equilibrium require a decrease in real wages in a particular region. In this regard, M. showed the importance of a high degree of labor mobility to compensate for such violations. In the article “The Theory of Optimal Currency Areas,” M. gave a definition of the optimal currency area, characterizing it as a set of regions between which the propensity to migrate is high enough to ensure full employment in the event that one of the regions faces “asymmetrical » violations, in other words, is experiencing an economic crisis.
The presence of floating exchange rates and a high degree of capital mobility characterize the economies of most countries in the world today. However, in the early 60s. the posing of these questions looked quite curious. M.'s scientific insight was manifested in the fact that in this single example he was able to see the trend in the development of the world economy. M.'s analysis was adopted as international capital markets became more open and the Bretton Woods system collapsed.
In another of his articles, “Capital Mobility and Stabilization Policy under Fixed and Flexible Rates,” published in the Canadian Journal of Economics in 1963 gg., M. analyzed the short-term effect of monetary and fiscal policies in an open economy. Despite its apparent simplicity, M.'s analysis contained a number of important, clearly formulated practical conclusions. Taking as a basis the well-known IS-LM diagram (“SC-DR”, or “savings for investment-money market”) for a closed economy, originally developed by John Hicks, M. introduced foreign trade and capital mobility into it . This allowed him to show the direct dependence of the results of stabilization policy on the degree of capital mobility in world markets, as well as on the exchange rate regime. In particular, M. developed a model of an open economy, which showed the following pattern: the effect of monetary and fiscal policy depends on the accepted assumption regarding the exchange rates regime. Under the condition of absolute capital mobility, the model showed the ineffectiveness of monetary policy under conditions of fixed exchange rates and the ineffectiveness of fiscal policy under flexible exchange rates.
A similar study of the conditions for the effectiveness of stabilization policy was undertaken at approximately the same time - in the early 60s - independently of M., who died in 1976, Marcus Fleming, who for many years was deputy head of the research department of the International Monetary Fund and was already working in this department when M. arrived there. The model of stabilization policy independently developed by both researchers bears their names, although, according to experts, M.’s contribution has priority in terms of the depth and range of analysis, as well as the credibility of the research. The Mandell-Fleming model is included in all macroeconomics textbooks today.
M.'s research, carried out several decades ago, today seems generally accepted. Due to the significantly increased mobility of capital in the world economy, the increasing degree of openness of markets, exchange rate regimes with temporarily fixed but adjustable exchange rates became increasingly weak and increasingly called into question. Many researchers and practical politicians saw the most suitable alternatives as a currency union or a floating exchange rate - both of these options were analyzed in the works of M. His idea of ​​​​an optimal currency area attracted special attention in connection with the formation of the European Monetary Union and the preparation for the introduction of a pan-European currency (common European currency).
M. made contributions to other areas of macroeconomic theory. He, in particular, showed that high inflation rates can force investors to reduce cash balances in favor of investing in the real sector of the economy (real capital), leading to the conclusion that even expected inflation may have positive economic impact, encouraging investors to act in this way. This conclusion was called the “Mandell-Tobin effect” because J. Tobin also showed that the benefits of increased economic activity, even if it occurs in the presence of high inflation rates, exceed the losses caused by inflation.
M. also developed the theory of international trade (international trade theory), clarifying how the mobility of labor on the world market leads to equalization of prices for goods in a number of countries, even if the foreign trade of these countries is limited by trade barriers. This discovery of M. is considered as a “mirror reflection” of the well-known position of Heckschex-Ohlin-Samuelson regarding the fact that free trade in goods tends to equalize remuneration for labor and capital, even if international capital movement and migration labor resources are limited.
M. was an adviser to many international organizations, including the UN, IMF, World Bank, European Commission, as well as a number of governments in Latin America and Europe, the Federal Reserve Commission, the US Treasury, etc. In 1972-1973. He was a member of the group of experts preparing for economic and monetary union in Europe, and also took part in the work of the permanent study group on international monetary reform (1964-1978). In 1971 - 1987 M. is the chairman of the regular Conferences on International Monetary Reform held in Santa Colombo (Santa Colomba Conferences on International Monetary Reform). He is a professor at many American (Princeton, Cambridge, Chicago, Pennsylvania, University of Southern California) and honorary doctorates at a number of foreign universities (Paris, 1992; Renminsky, China, 1995), as well as a member of the American Economic Association (1997), the American Academy of Sciences and Arts (1998). Awarded the Guggenheim Prize (1971), the Jacques Rueff Medal (1983), etc.
In 1999, M. became a laureate of the Alfred Nobel Prize in Economics “for the analysis of monetary and budgetary (fiscal) policies under various exchange rate regimes, as well as the analysis of optimal currency areas” .
Works: Evolution of the international monetary system // Problems of theory and practice of management. 2000. No. 1.
A Theory of Optimum Currency Areas // American Economic Review, 1961, No. 51, pp. 657-665; Capital Mobility and Stabilization Policy under Fixed and Flexible Exchange Rates // Canadian Journal of Economics, 1963,
No. 29, pp. 475-485; The International Monetary System: Conflict and Reform. Montreal, 1965; International Economics. N.Y., 1968 (translated into Italian, German, French, Japanese and Chinese); Man and Economics. N.Y., 1968 (also published in India, Japan, Portugal, China, Spain, Germany and France); Monetary Theory: Interest, Inflation and Growth in the World Economy. Pacific Palisades, Ca., 1971 (translated into French, German, Japanese, Portuguese and Spanish); The Future of the International Financial System // Bretton Woods revisited (ed. A.Acheson, J.Chant, M.Prachowny). Toronto, 1972, pp. 91-104; Building the New Europe (ed. jointly with M. Baldassarre). Vol. 1-2. London, 1993; The World Economy in Transition: What Leading Economists Think. London, 1996; Inflation and Growth in China (co-edited with M. Guitian). Washington, DC: International Monetary Fund, 1996; Macroeconomic Stabilization in Transition Economies (ed. M.Blejer, M.Skreb). Cambridge, 1997; Updating the Agenda for Monetary Reform // Optimum Currency Areas (ed. M.J. Blejer, J.A. Frankel, etc.) Washington, 1997; The International Monetary System in the 21st Century: Could gold make a comeback? Latrobe, PA: Center for Economic Policy Studies, St. Vincent College, 1997; Uses and Abuses of Gresham’s Law in the History of Money // Zagreb Journal of Economics. 1998. No. 2, pp. 3-38; The Euro as a Stabilizer in the International Monetary System (co-edited with A. Clesse). 2000. Central Banking and Monetary Policy in Transition (in press).

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Robert Alexander Mundell(English) Robert Alexander Mundell; genus. October 24, Kingston, Canada) - Canadian economist. Winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics (1999) “for his analysis of monetary and fiscal policies under various exchange rate regimes, as well as his analysis of optimal currency areas.” He studied at the University of British Columbia, the University of Washington, where he received his doctorate, and the University of Chicago. He has taught at Stanford and Chicago.

Essays

• "The International Monetary System: Conflict and Reform" The International Monetary System: Conflict and Reform , )
• "Monetary Theory: Interest, Inflation and Growth in the World Economy" Monetary Theory: Interest, Inflation and Growth in the World Economy , )

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• on the website (English)
• (on the Nobel Committee website (English))

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Excerpt characterizing Mundell, Robert

A little curly girl, crying out of fright, gave the knight her doll - her most precious treasure... The doll's head easily flew off, and after it the head of the owner rolled like a ball on the floor...
Unable to bear it any longer, sobbing bitterly, I fell to my knees... Were these PEOPLE?! WHAT could you call a person who committed such evil?!
I didn’t want to watch it any further!.. I had no more strength left... But the North mercilessly continued to show some cities, with churches burning in them... These cities were completely empty, not counting the thousands of corpses thrown right on streets, and spilled rivers of human blood, drowning in which wolves feasted... Horror and pain shackled me, not allowing me to breathe even for a minute. Not allowing you to move...

How must the “people” who gave such orders have felt??? I think they didn’t feel anything at all, because their ugly, callous souls were black.

Suddenly I saw a very beautiful castle, the walls of which were damaged in places by catapults, but mostly the castle remained intact. The entire courtyard was littered with corpses of people drowning in pools of their own and others' blood. Everyone's throat was cut...
– This is Lavaur, Isidora... A very beautiful and rich city. Its walls were the most protected. But the leader of the crusaders, Simon de Montfort, enraged by unsuccessful attempts, called for help all the rabble he could find, and... 15,000 “soldiers of Christ” who came to the call attacked the fortress... Unable to withstand the onslaught, Lavur fell. All residents, including 400 (!!!) Perfects, 42 troubadours and 80 knights-defenders, brutally fell at the hands of the “holy” executioners. Here, in the courtyard, you see only the knights who defended the city, and also those who held weapons in their hands. The rest (except for the burned Qatari) were slaughtered and simply left to rot in the streets... In the city basement, the killers found 500 hidden women and children - they were brutally killed right there... without going outside...
Some people brought a pretty, well-dressed young woman, chained in chains, into the castle courtyard. Drunken whooping and laughter began all around. The woman was roughly grabbed by the shoulders and thrown into the well. Muffled, pitiful moans and screams were immediately heard from the depths. They continued until the crusaders, by order of the leader, filled the well with stones...
– It was Lady Giralda... The owner of the castle and this city... All her subjects, without exception, loved her very much. She was soft and kind... And she carried her first unborn baby under her heart. – North finished harshly.
Then he looked at me, and apparently immediately realized that I simply had no more strength left...
The horror ended immediately.
Sever sympathetically approached me, and, seeing that I was still trembling heavily, he gently put his hand on my head. He stroked my long hair, quietly whispering words of reassurance. And I gradually began to come to life, coming to my senses after a terrible, inhuman shock... A swarm of unasked questions was annoyingly swirling in my tired head. But all these questions now seemed empty and irrelevant. Therefore, I preferred to wait to see what the North would say.

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics (1999) “for his analysis of monetary and fiscal policies under various exchange rate regimes, as well as his analysis of optimal currency areas.” He studied at the University of British Columbia, the University of Washington, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received his doctorate, and the University of Chicago. He taught at Stanford and Chicago.

Robert Mandell was born in 1932 in the city of Kingston, in the south of the Canadian province of Ontario. Robert graduated from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, after which he graduated from the University of Washington in Seattle. He received his Doctor of Science degree in economics in 1956 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He also studied at the London School of Economics for several years.

Since 1974, Mandell worked at Columbia University, where in 2001 he received the highest title of professor of economics.

He got his first job at Stanford University, where he worked as a lecturer.

lem of economics. And after that he worked at Johns Hopkins University.

In 1961, Mundell decided to try his hand at the International Monetary Fund, where he worked until 1966.

Until 1971, he taught at the University of Chicago, and after that at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva; There he spent several years, also holding the position of professor of economics.

During this time, Mundell began working on the analysis of monetary and fiscal policies under various exchange rate regimes, and also began analyzing optimal currency areas. For his lecture "A Reconsideration of the Twentieth Century" he received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1999. At that time

he was already 67 years old.

After this, Robert Mundell began working as an economic adviser to the United Nations Organization, the World Bank, the European Commission and the United States Department of the Treasury. Robert Mundell is also an economic adviser to Canada and other countries.

In 1971, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship in the amount of $43,000.

In 1922, Mandell received a second doctorate, this time from the University of Paris. He has also received honorary professorships from the Brookings Institution, the University of Chicago, and the University of Southern California.

nia, McGill University, the University of Pennsylvania, the Bologna Center, Renmin University of China and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The Zhongguancun County University in Beijing was named after him.

Robert's face often appeared on television screens. The first time this happened was in October 2002, on David Letterman's Late Show with David Letterman on CBS. In the program, Robert discussed 10 changes in his life that occurred after receiving the Nobel Prize (Ways My Life has Changed Since Winning the Nobel Prize). In 2004, he appeared on television several more times, but only in humorous programs.

In September 2004, Robert appeared on screen to read several pages from Paris Hilton's memoirs.

He was also the guest of honor at the Game Five of the 2010 World Chess Championshi and made the traditional first move in the duel between Viswanathan Anand and Veselin Topalov.

On June 5, 2009, Robert Mundell visited Russia. He participated in the annual international economic forum held in St. Petersburg.

Mundell is the author of two books: The International Monetary System: Conflict and Reform, published in 1965, and Monetary Theory: Interest , Inflation and Growth in the World Economy), which was published in 1971.

R. Mundell is familiar to us for constructing open economy models together with J. Fleming. In October 1999, Mundell was awarded the Nobel Prize for his comprehensive work on international economic relations and in particular on the so-called optimal currency areas.
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The 1999 Nobel laureate was born in 1932 in Ontario (Canada), he received his first bachelor's degree in 1953 from the University of British Columbia; He continued his education at the famous University of Massachusetts and the London School of Economics.
In 1955 he became a doctor and professor in the field of economic sciences.
An important step in Mundell’s creative biography was his transition in 1961 to work at the International Monetary Fund, as well as his work as a consultant to the Board of Governors of the US Federal Reserve System (FRS).
After the presentation of the high award to Robert Mundell, a discussion arose in economic circles and in journal commentaries about the merits and some of the shortcomings of the 1999 Nobel laureate.
Lauren White, a professor at Columbia Business School, says Robert Mundell is a theorist, but his hypotheses have significant practical value because they allow us to better understand what is happening in the world. Mundell's theory reveals that the degree of effectiveness of domestic monetary policy in conditions of free movement of capital depends on which exchange rate (ER) the country's government chooses - fixed or floating.
This topic was continued by M. Bernstam, professor at Stanford University of California. He calls Mundell the great economist of his time who created the perfect international macroeconomics. Mundell identified the interdependence of monetary and fixed policies, as had been done previously, on exchange rate policies, international trade, and capital flows. In other words, Mundell brought into a single system everything that naturally exists in the world economy, but was previously analyzed in the form of separate components.
Building this model was extremely difficult, but Mundell did it.
Robert Mundell linked one type of exchange rate or another to a country's wealth. The latter is very important when scientists turn to Russia. Bernshtam believes: until August 17, 1998, Russia had a fixed exchange rate, which ended in a crisis. Since the fall of 1998, the country has had a floating exchange rate. In the first case (fixed exchange rate), state monetary policy turned out to be practically powerless and was reduced to printing additional money from time to time, which destroyed the fixed exchange rate. A floating exchange rate allows for flexible manipulation of monetary policy, and fiscal measures in this situation are limited, since there is a free flow of capital, foreigners buy and sell government securities, i.e. there is some kind of unified system of relations.
Bernstam called Mundell's theory a revolution in science, reminiscent of Copernicus's revolution in astronomy, since it was also about the creation of a unified scientific system.
In 1961, Professor Mundell published a book with the abstract title "On Optimal Currency Areas." This theoretical work showed that countries have difficulty maintaining their currencies and exchanging them because there are barriers to rational business management and resource allocation. This applies primarily to neighboring states. It is much more effective to interact if countries have similar economic development conditions, although the homogeneity of the environments is quite conditional. But in general, modern Europe is a single organism with an emerging monetary unity, necessary for a more rational allocation of resources, for the organization and creation of a single economic space. In this situation, Mundell's theoretical ideas turned out to be quite acceptable. It is clear that when the problem took on concrete shape, the euro began to be looked at as a sign marking some new currency area. Meanwhile, when Professor Mundell studied the concept of a currency area, he apparently had his native Canada and the United States primarily in mind. The time of unification under the shadow of the single American dollar of the United States, Canada and, probably, Mexico is approaching.
The head of the Research Center in Washington, William Niskansen, made independent judgments about Mundell’s theory. It is well known that the euro will struggle. According to Mundell’s theory, for the functioning of the single currency region it is necessary to create a flexible labor market and high mobility of labor resources in this region. This is not the case in Europe yet. Mundell is a brilliant economist and deservedly won the Nobel Prize, but Niskansen is surprised by journalists who have attributed to him a prominent role in creating the single European currency. There is some kind of mystery here. Nevertheless, R. Mundell’s theory itself is widely recognized in the world today. This is a theory about how wide a region can be with a single
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currency. According to Mundell, such a region must meet at least one of two necessary conditions. Firstly, countries included in the single currency area must be stable and similar in terms of economic development; secondly, have a high degree of flexibility and dynamism of the labor market. According to U. Niskansen, the first factor - homogeneity of economic development - is still largely absent in both Europe and the United States. But unlike Europe, the United States has an extremely flexible and dynamic labor market, in which people actively move from state to state, from one region of the country to another. Europe in general is too large to be economically homogeneous to the extent described in the works of R. Mundell, and labor migrates from one country to another only to a small extent. That is why Niskansen is somewhat surprised that the introduction of the euro is associated with the ideas that were put forward at one time by R. Mundell.
M. Bernshtam approaches the issue of labor movement from a different angle. Labor costs, as is known, constitute the main costs, or costs, in the economy. In Western households, labor costs represent 75% of national income, i.e. salary expenses, and 25% is return on capital, profit on capital. Almost the entire economic system, i.e. welfare depends on the price of labor. It follows that if a country has low productivity and is underdeveloped, then labor there is cheap. If a country is characterized by high productivity, people there are educated and have good work skills, then in this country labor is relatively expensive. It is difficult for such partner countries to have a single currency. To create a single currency area, it is generally necessary, or at least would be extremely useful, to have a single level of wages and a single system of labor markets.
In magazine articles and discussions of the works of the new Nobel laureate, he began to be called the creator or builder of the European system. Responding to this, Mr. Mundell noted that, most likely, he could be considered one of the “godfathers” of the European Union.
Professor Mundell's works are devoted mainly to the open economies of developed countries. The hypothesis of optimal currency zones, which became the central link of his macroeconomic reasoning, appeared in the early 60s. However, Mundell's subsequent works are also quite noteworthy. Let's look at the book "The Great Downturns" published in 1997. In it, along with the depression of the 30s. or rather, starting from those difficult years, the author examines subsequent shocks, so different from each other. A special place is occupied by the economic downturns that broke out after the fall of totalitarian regimes, the reasons for the sharp decline in national incomes in Russia. Mundell outlines his understanding of the causes of the great recession in Russia in the 1990s and analyzes the mistakes of government policy, in particular in the financial and monetary spheres. Some American scholars consider The Great Recessions to be one of the best works on post-communist economies.