Economist Ragnar Nurkse, Centenary of his Birth

For his 100th anniversary on 5 October 2007, the Estonian Postal Service commemorated Nurkse with an international letter stamp. He was policy maker mainly in the fields of international finance and economic development.

Ragnar Nurkse is beyond doubt the only economist of Estonian descent with a truly international reputation and apparently also the internationally best known Estonian savant of all times.

 

 

 

Ragnar Nurkse was born on 5 October 1907 in Käru village, now Raplamaa county of the then Governorate of Estonia of the Russian Empire, son of an Estonian father who worked himself up from lumberjack to estate manager and an Estonian-Swedish mother. His parents emigrated from Estonia to Canada in 1928.  

He completed the course of the Tallinn Cathedral School in 1926 and six years later graduated as an economist from Edinburgh University. In 1934–45 he worked at the Secretariat of the League of Nations, publishing in 1944 a text that soon became classical, International Currency Experience: Lessons of the Inter-War Period, a thorough analysis of international financial relations between the two world wars. This paper played an enormous role in building up the Bretton Woods international monetary management system. In 1947 Ragnar Nurkse was elected full professor of Columbia University. 

Nurkse is one of the founding fathers of Classical Development Economics. Together with Rosenstein-Rodan and Mandelbaum, he promoted a 'theory of the big push', emphasized the role of savings and capital formation in economic development, and argued that poor nations remained poor because of a vicious circle of poverty.

Among his major works are International Currency Experience: Lessons of the Interwar Period (1944), the foundation of the Bretton Woods Agreement, Conditions of International Monetary Equilibrium (1945), and Problems of Capital Formation in Underdeveloped Countries (1953).

Ragnar Nurkse died on 6 May 1959 in Switzerland and is buried in Vevey. A memorial stone will be inaugurated at Ragnar Nurkse’s birthplace in Käru on 5 October.