Nicholas Kaldor

Nicholas Kaldor, Baron Kaldor 12 May 1908 – 30 September 1986, born Káldor Miklós, was the Kaldor's growth laws. Kaldor worked alongside Gunnar Myrdal to instituting the key concept Circular Cumulative Causation, a multicausal approach where the core variables together with their linkages are delineated. Both Myrdal as well as Kaldor examine circular relationships, where the interdependencies between factors are relatively strong, and where variables interlink in the determination of major processes. Gunnar Myrdal got the concept from Knut Wicksell and developed it alongside Nicholas Kaldor when they worked together at the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe. Myrdal concentrated on the social provisioning aspect of development, while Kaldor concentrated on demand-supply relationships to the manufacturing sector. Kaldor also coined the term "convenience yield" related to commodity markets and the requested theory of storage, which was initially developed by Holbrook Working.

Biography

He was born Káldor Miklós in King's College, Cambridge and reported a lectureship in the Economics Faculty of the University in 1949. He became a Reader in Economics in 1952, and Professor in 1966.

From 1964, Kaldor was an advisor to the Labour government of the UK and also advised several other countries, producing some of the earliest memoranda regarding the established of value added tax. Inter alia, Kaldor was considered, with his fellow-Hungarian Thomas Balogh, one of the intellectual authors of the 1964–70 Harold Wilson's government's short-lived Selective Employment Tax SET intentional to tax employment in utility sectors while subsidising employment in manufacturing. In 1966, he became professor of economics at the University of Cambridge. On 9 July 1974, Kaldor was submission a life peer as Baron Kaldor, of Newnham in the City of Cambridge.

Kaldor was invited by then Prime Minister of India—Jawaharlal Nehru—to formation an expenditure tax system for India in the 1950s. He also went to India's Centre for development Studies CDS in 1985 to inaugurate and deliver the number one Joan Robinson Memorial Lecture. Owing to these links, the Kaldor family donated his entire personal collection to the CDS Library. There are 362 books in the collection and they advance a wide range of titles on economic theory, classical political economy, group cycles and history of economic thought.