This week “The Economist explains” is given over to economics. For each of six days until Saturday this blog will publish a short explainer on a seminal idea. DOES trade hurt wages? Or, more precisely ...

Wolfgang F. Stolper, 89, an economist whose work included a theory used to explain the effect of international trade on wages, died Monday in Ann Arbor, Mich., during surgery to clear a blood clot.

There was a big debate about this in the economics profession in the early 1990s. Not one single economist argued about the direction of trade’s effect ? it was universally agreed that it was negative ...

Founder of Modern Economics: Paul A. Samuelson, Volume 1—Becoming Samuelson, 1915-1948. By Roger Backhouse. Oxford University Press; 760 pages; $34.95 and £22.99. IN 1940, Paul Samuelson needed an ...

“To me the most beautiful word in the dictionary is ‘tariff,’” former US president Donald Trump told an audience at the Economic Club of Chicago last week. Judging from the thunderous applause that ...

In a famous theorem, known as Stolper-Samuelson, he and a co-author showed that competition from imports of clothes and similar goods from underdeveloped countries, where producers rely on unskilled ...