Hacia un envejecimiento responsable: Las reformas de los sistemas pensionales América Latina

Durante buena parte de la era previa a la globalización, desde la década de 1860 hasta la I Guerra Mundial, Estados Unidos mantuvo aranceles sorprendentemente elevados. Los historiadores que se ocupan del tema económico actual han sugerido que el proteccionismo de EE. UU. fue producto de una `reacción violenta` contra la globalización que fue el comienzo de su fin. También han sostenido que esa reacción violenta encierra una enseñanza para el presente: específicamente, que debemos ocuparnos de las desigualdades de la distribución que engendra la globalización, o de lo contrario la globalización volverá a sembrar la semilla de su propia destrucción. Demuestro que los aranceles de EE. UU. no fueron el producto de una reacción violenta. Un recuento de ideas sobre economía en EE. UU. durante el Siglo XIX concentrado en dos comisiones arancelarias en 1866-1870 y 1882 revela que las ideas debatidas en los círculos intelectuales y de políticas de ese entonces no mostraban señal alguna de una reacción violenta contra la globalización. La característica importante de la historia intelectual y arancelaria de EE. UU. no es una reacción violenta contra la globalización, sino más bien la falta, en la mayoría de los recuentos históricos, de ciertos pensadores e ideas que fueron fundamentales para la discusión. Por consiguiente, la enseñanza que encierra la historia para la actualidad no es que debemos ocuparnos de las desigualdades de la globalización. (Es probable que esa enseñanza se mantenga o quede fuera de la historia). En vez de eso, se trata de que necesitamos ocuparnos de la idea de la reacción violenta, la cual tiene un asidero en la historia más profundo que los elementos de juicio. La enseñanza implica que para entender el presente y el futuro de la globalización, lo que se necesita son recuentos históricos de las ideas.

The Free-Trade Doctrine and Commercial Diplomacy of Condy Raguet

Condy Raguet (1784-1842) was the first Chargé d’Affaires from the United States to Brazil and a conspicuous author of political economy from the 1820s to the early 1840s. He contributed to the era’s free-trade doctrine as editor of influential periodicals, most notably The Banner of the Constitution. Before leading the free-trade cause, however, he was poised to negotiate a reciprocity treaty between the United States and Brazil, acting under the authority of Secretary of State and protectionist apostle Henry Clay. Raguet’s career and ideas provide a window into the uncertain relationship of reciprocity to the cause of free trade

On Kindleberger and Hegemony: From Berlin to M.I.T. and Back

The most notable idea of Charles P. Kindleberger’s later career is the value of a single country acting as stabilizer of an international economy prone to instability. It runs through his widely read books, The World in Depression, 1929-1939 (1973), Manias, Crises, and Panics (1978), A Financial History of Western Europe (1984), and kindred works. “Hegemonic stability,” the idea is called in the literature it inspired. This essay traces Kindleberger’s attachment to the idea back to his tenure as chief of the State Department’s Division of German and Austrian Economic Affairs from 1945 to 1947 and adviser to the European Recovery Program from 1947 to 1948. In both capacities Kindleberger observed and participated indirectly in the 1948 monetary reform in Western Germany. In the 1990s, during his octogenary decade, he revisited the German monetary reform with a fellow participant, economist, and longtime friend, F. Taylor Ostrander. Their collaborative essay marked Kindleberger’s effort to reclaim hegemonic stability theory from the scholars who developed it following his works of the 1970s and 1980s

ECAES, SaberPro, and the History of Economic Thought at EAFIT

This article studies implications of the recent redesign of the "Economic Analysis" module of the standardized test formerly known as ECAES, lately redsignated SaberPro -- Its main concern is with the implications to the curriculum at the Universidad EAFIT – more specifically, with the adequacy of the history of economic thought (h.e.t.) part of the curriculum as preparation for the test and for other purposes -- The sources of information for the article include conversations and correspondence with the academic and administrative leadership of the EAFIT Escuela de Economía y Finanzas and Departmento de Economía -- They also include h.e.t. course syllabi from the Universidad EAFIT and, by way of comparison, from the Universidad de los Andes, the Universidad de Antioquia, and elsewhere; documents regarding the objectives and format of the ECAES economics exam obtained from the ICFES and AFADECO websites; and data for exam results over the period 2006 to 2009 obtained from ICFE

The (Far) Backstory of the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement

In two pairs of episodes, first in 1824 and 1846 and then in 1892 and 1935, similar U.S.-Colombia trade agreements or their enabling laws were embraced first by protectionists and then by free traders. The history of the episodes supports the view that although political institutions exist to curb de facto political power, such power may be wielded to undo the institutions’ intended effects. The doctrinal affinities and interests of political actors are more decisive determinants of the free-trade or protectionist orientation of trade agreements than the agreements’ texts or legal superstructures. The long delay from signing to passage of the current U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement is another case in point

Postbellum Protection and Commissioner Wells's Conversion to Free Trade

A moment of consequence to the postbellum U.S. tariff debate was the 'conversion' of David Ames Wells, Commissioner of the Revenue from 1865- 1870, to free trade. When he began his work Wells was a disciple of the eminent American protectionist Henry C. Carey. By the age of forty, however, he had become America's answer to Britain's Sir Robert Peel: a public figure of tremendous influence, who, having changed his mind on the issue, became the standard-bearer for free trade in both the intellectual and political arenas. Half a century and more in the past, when Wells's name was better remembered in American economic and political history, several stories were told of the causes of his conversion: some attributed it ultimately to the force of ideas, some to interests. My purpose is to demonstrate that the unacknowledged but most important cause was Wells's relationship with Edward Atkinson, and Wells and Atkinson's mutual wish to grant effective protection, or net protection, to cotton manufacturers. The story of Wells's conversion that unfolds in the demonstration is not one that disentangles and assigns weights to the contributions of theory and interests. It shows instead how each determined the other.Wells, David Ames; Atkinson, Edward; free trade; revenue commission; effective protection; net protection

Observations beyond the 2-year impact window

In 2018, Clarivate Analytics, publisher of the Web of Science Journal Citation Reports (JCR), suppressed publication of the 2017 Journal Impact Factor (JIF) for three of the four journals that it then indexed in the academic field of history of economics. Clarivate judged one of the journals, History of Economic Ideas (HEI), to be the “donor” of citations that distorted the impact factors of the European Journal of the History of Economic Thought (EJHET) and the Journal of the History of Economic Thought (JHET). The other journal, History of Political Economy (HOPE), was not included in that judgment. Our purpose is to define the JIF, summarize the controversy that gave rise to this symposium, and discuss methodologically and historically some of the problems with the use of citation indexes in general and the JIF in particular. We show how these problems pertain differently to the scholarly field of the history of economics than to economics in general. In so doing we also introduce the following five articles of this symposium

SARS-CoV-2-specific immune responses and clinical outcomes after COVID-19 vaccination in patients with immune-suppressive disease

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) immune responses and infection outcomes were evaluated in 2,686 patients with varying immune-suppressive disease states after administration of two Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) vaccines. Overall, 255 of 2,204 (12%) patients failed to develop anti-spike antibodies, with an additional 600 of 2,204 (27%) patients generating low levels (<380 AU ml−1). Vaccine failure rates were highest in ANCA-associated vasculitis on rituximab (21/29, 72%), hemodialysis on immunosuppressive therapy (6/30, 20%) and solid organ transplant recipients (20/81, 25% and 141/458, 31%). SARS-CoV-2-specific T cell responses were detected in 513 of 580 (88%) patients, with lower T cell magnitude or proportion in hemodialysis, allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation and liver transplant recipients (versus healthy controls). Humoral responses against Omicron (BA.1) were reduced, although cross-reactive T cell responses were sustained in all participants for whom these data were available. BNT162b2 was associated with higher antibody but lower cellular responses compared to ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccination. We report 474 SARS-CoV-2 infection episodes, including 48 individuals with hospitalization or death from COVID-19. Decreased magnitude of both the serological and the T cell response was associated with severe COVID-19. Overall, we identified clinical phenotypes that may benefit from targeted COVID-19 therapeutic strategies

A Tale of Two Tariff Commissions and One Dubious ¿Globalization Backlash?

During much of the previous era of globalization, from the 1860s until the First World War, U.S. tariffs were surprisingly high. Present-day economic historians have suggested that U.S. protection as the result of a backlash against globalization that was the beginning of its decline. They have also argued that the backlash holds a lesson for the present: specifically, that we must attend to the distributive inequities that globalization engenders, or else globalization will again plant the seeds of its own destruction. I show that U.S. tariffs were not the product of backlash. A history of economic ideas in the nineteenth century United States, centered on two tariff commissions in 1866-1870 and 1882, reveals that the ideas debated in intellectual and policy circles alike bore no trace of globalization backlash. The important feature of U.S. intellectual and tariff policy history is not globalization backlash, but rather the absence from most historical accounts of certain thinkers and ideas that were crucial to the debate. Accordingly, the lesson that history holds for the present is not that we must attend to globalization's inequities. (That lesson is likely to stand or fall apart from history.) Instead it is that we need to attend to the /idea/ of backlash, which has a foothold in history that is deeper than the evidence. The lesson implies that to understand the present and future of globalization, what are required are histories of ideas