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EDGARD MILHAUD AND THE CASE FOR ESTABLISHING AN INTERNATIONAL CLEARING UNION IN THE 1930S: A FORGOTTEN FORERUNNER OF KEYNES?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2023

Adrien Faudot Open the ORCID record for Adrien Faudot [Opens in a new window]  and
Nikolay Nenovsky
Adrien Faudot*
Affiliation:
Adrien Faudot: University Grenoble Alpes, CREG, Grenoble, France.
Nikolay Nenovsky
Affiliation:
Nikolay Nenovsky: University of National and World Economy, Sofia, Bulgaria; LEFMI, University of Picardy Jules Verne, France, and SU HSE, Russian Federation.
*
Email: adrien.faudot@univ-grenoble-alpes.fr
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Abstract

Edgard Milhaud (1873–1964), a professor at the University of Geneva, published a series of texts (from 1932 onwards) promoting the establishment of multilateral international compensation between nation-states, and actively campaigned for this project. His plan centered on a call for a “gold truce” as an alternative to the bilateral clearing agreements that proliferated at the time. The plan drew the attention of several international organizations. It reached the point of arousing the interest of the League of Nations (LON), which decided in 1934 to launch an inquiry (published in 1935) questioning LON members about the project of making clearing agreements multilateral. The Milhaud plan nevertheless fell into oblivion after the Tripartite Agreement (1936) and then the outbreak of WW II. This work aims to situate the Milhaud plan in its intellectual and political context—i.e., the 1930s—analyze its content, and understand its failure. The article also assesses what it had in common with Keynes’s plan for an international clearing union developed several years later.

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Article
Information
Journal of the History of Economic Thought , First View , pp. 1 - 22
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of History of Economics Society

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Footnotes

The authors would like to thank the two anonymous referees for their useful remarks and suggestions. The usual caveats apply.

References

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