Academic, Economist (1899-1979)
Bertil Ohlin was a Noble Prize winning Swedish economist most famous in academia for the Heckscher-Ohlin model. As well as working as a professor of economics at the Stockholm School of Economics, Ohlin served as a politician for a number of years. Between 1944-67, he was the leader of the social-liberal People’s Party, the largest party opposing the Swedish government.
Ohlin developed the Hekscher-Ohlin model, alongside Eli Hecksher, in an effort to explain international trade and foreign capital flows. The model has since become a staple in undergraduate economics courses worldwide. The model was groundbreaking because it revealed how comparative advantage relates to an economy’s labour and capital flows, and explains how these flows can change over time.
“As mathematics had been my best subject at school, my parents proposed – and I accepted – studies at the University of Lund in mathematics, statistics, and economics. The choice of the latter subject is said to be due to the fact that at the age of five years, I was very fond of calculating the cost of the various cakes my mother used to bake.”
– Bertil Ohlin