2015/07/03 by Nikolay Nenovsky, Dominique Torre · 1 citation
Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Social Sciences · #Global Economic and Social Development #Political Economy and Marxism
paper · doi:10.1080/00213624.2015.1072388
openalex publication_date 2015/07/03 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
Mihail Manoilescu was among the foremost intellectual figures of the interwar period in Romania. He was known as a politician and central banker, as well as an economist. From the very beginning of his theoretical and practical career, or at least from the late 1920s onward, Manoilescu’s ideas and theories (especially his corporatist theory) were marked by clear continuity and consistency based on the theory of protectionism grounded on productivity differences. By developing his model — an alternative to the theory of comparative advantage — Manoilescu endeavored to show the need for protectionist measures to promote the development of peripheral countries. His defense of protectionism is usually presented as clumsy and founded on an incorrect method, even if he is often recognized as the forerunner of the theory of unequal exchange and the dependency theory. Few scholars note the similarity of Manoilescu’s theory with Karl Marx’s labor theory. This paper contributes to validating Manoilescu’s conclusions, the soundness of which we test here by reconstructing the theory from a Marxian perspective. A reconstruction of this type offers new possibilities of evaluating his theory and a better understanding of its contributions and limitations.