DOING MONETARY ECONOMICS IN THE SOUTH: SUBERCASEAUX ON PAPER MONEY

Abstract

In 1912 Guillermo Subercaseaux (1872–1959), a professor of economics at the University of Chile, published El Papel Moneda, translated into French in 1920 as Le Papier-Monnaie. The paper provides a full treatment of Subercaseaux’s interpretation of the working of paper-money economies, including his approach to the determination of the exchange rate of depreciated currencies and his views about the problem posed by the existence of a positive value of inconvertible paper money. We investigate how his framework was related to classic contributions by Adolph Wagner (1868), Carlo Ferraris (1879), and Wesley C. Mitchell (1903, 1908). We also deal with the background formed by the South American debates between ‘papeleros’ and ‘oreros’ (paper-money and gold-standard supporters) at the time. The paper offers an investigation of an aspect of the international transmission of economic ideas, this time from the periphery to the center.