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Petre Țuțea (October 6, 1902 – December 3, 1991) was a Romanian Christian thinker and an orator, who was preoccupied with philosophical and religious matters. He was the author of numerous studies and articles that focused on economic, social and political issues in the inter-war era. This paper intends to point out the main guiding lines of Petre Țuțea’s system of thought as an economist and his personal comprehension of the relation between the economic and the political elements

Mihai Eminescu (January 8, 1850 – June 14, 1889) was a poet, a prose writer and a publicist who was active around the year 1848. He was equally interested and approached the economic, social and political themes that defined the Romanian society of his times. This paper wishes to point out the guiding lines of Eminescu’s economic thinking and the fundamental reference points of his economic and political ideology.

Alexandru C. Cuza (Iași, November 8, 1857 – Sibiu, November 3, 1947) was a Romanian politician, a university professor and an anti-Semitic scholar. He was the founder of the Romanian national and Christian doctrine. The purpose of this paper is to analyse Cuza’s main directions of economic thinking and his contribution to shaping a Romanian national economic doctrine.

Ion Ionescu de la Brad (Roman, June 24 / July 6, 1818 – Brad, December 16/28, 1891) was an agronomist, the founder of the Romanian agronomic education, an 1848 revolutionary, the most important Romanian agricultural economist of the 19th century. Our paper aims at emphasizing the national and original character of his economic thinking, as well as the theoretical and ideological basis of the solutions he suggested for solving the agrarian problem.

Ion Ghica (Bucharest, August 12, 1816 - Ghergani, May 7, 1897) was a Romanian engineer, writer and politician. He was among the first to try to adapt the ideas of the liberal economic school to the realities that existed in our country back then. He actively fought for the development of the national economy through increasing production in quantity and quality and through building railways. The purpose of this paper is to emphasize not only Ghica’s contributions to adapting classical liberal economic ideas to the Romanian socio-economic conditions in those times but also the specific elements of his economic thinking.

Nicolae Şuţu (Arnăut-Keuy, October 25, 1798-Făurei, January 10, 1871) was a Romanian economist, writer and statesman. He contributed to spreading the ideas of economic liberalism all over the Romanian Principalities, as well as to putting those ideas into practice. The measures he brought forward and the efforts he made in order to accomplish them make him an important reformer of his country. The purpose of this paper is to present the author’s main economic ideas in a scientifically explanatory manner and to draw a correlation between them and the principal economic ideology of those times.

Simion Bărnuţiu (July 21, 1808 - May 24, 1864) was a Romanian politician and scholar who followed the tradition of the Transylvanian School (Şcoala ardeleană) and the German Rationalism. He is considered to be the ideologist and the political leader of the Romanian Revolution of 1848 in Transylvania. He was mainly preoccupied with philosophy and legal science and had a significant contribution to establishing the principles of political and legal organization for the new Romanian unified state, but also to proposing solutions for the Romanian economic problems.

George Bariţiu (May 24, 1812 - May 2, 1893) was a Romanian politician, journalist and historian who had significant contributions in the field of economic thinking. As a promoter of the idea to assert the Romanian identity, and an activist for the Romanians to enter economic life, Bariţiu advanced a series of economic claims and aspirations. At the core of his analytical pursuit there were fundamental economic issues: competition, ownership, the peasants’ problem, the development of industry and of trade.

Simion Mehedinţi (1869-1962) is considered to be the founder of the Romanian modern geography, but he had remarkable contributions in other fields of activity as well: ethnography, history, science philosophy, pedagogy, and literature. The economic meanings of his thinking, though not explicit, are quite deep. The purpose of this paper is to analyze certain concepts that Mehedinți used from an economic perspective. He studied the biunique interaction between human and environment and granted man (population) a first rate role within geography. In a narrow sense, civilization means not only what and how much is produced, but also how it is produced. Culture, as the sum of all spiritual accomplishments, is the specific view of a people on the moral universe and it emerges as the result of the same cause: labor, the decisive element that sets man and animal apart.

Dimitrie Cantemir (1673-1723), one of the most erudite scholars of his times, was a historian, a philosopher, a geographer, a theologian and a musicologist. A world-class encyclopedian scientist, Dimitrie Cantemir was the first great Romanian intellectual to have been acknowledged as a member of the European culture. The purpose of this paper is to point out the economic ideas that emerge from his writings, as well as the patriotic layer of his views on economic issues. The specific historical conditions and his background as a humanist made Cantemir focus on the issue of creating an independent centralized nation by creating a national market imposed by the logic of economic progress.

Mihail Kogălniceanu (1817-1891) was an erudite historian, a lawyer, a liberal economic thinker, and an extraordinary rhetorician. He was a complex and prominent personality of the Romanian political life for more than half a century who emphasized the need for Romania to develop as a national, unified, democratic and independent state. He understood all too well the concept of progress as necessary evolution, as development in the positive way. In this paper, we identify the main coordinates of Mihail Kogălniceanu’s thinking about the importance of studying history as a factor of progress and analyzing the economic and social structures of those times as a premise for reforming society. Ferment of the revolutionary climate in Moldavia, Mihail Kogălniceanu considered that knowing the historic past was a prerequisite for asserting the national consciousness of the Romanian people. His writings followed two major coordinates: the criticism of feudalism and the national emancipation.

Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea (1855-1920) was an economist, a philosopher, a sociologist and a literary critic who had a major contribution to the spread of Marxism in Romania and who studied the relations in our country through this current of thought. Amongst his most relevant preoccupations was the study of the agrarian issue, which led him to formulate the theory of the neo-serfdom. He painted a very realistic picture of the European economic world of his time and worked out the thesis of development from forms to the roots in the less developed countries. The purpose of this paper is to emphasize the specific features of Gherea’s economic thinking and the historical context of his main ideas.

Alexandru Dimitrie Xenopol (1847-1920) was a historian, a economist, a sociologist and a philosopher with a vast scientific and publishing activity in the field of economics. Interested in the analysis of the Romanian economic situation in his times, he came up with a series of economic policy recommendations meant to accelerate progress. Be believed that the main cause of the lesser development of the country was the mainly agricultural character of its economy, and that the solution was to firstly develop the manufacturing industry that processed agricultural raw materials through an internal protectionism (incentives from the government). The purpose of this paper is to identify the specific features of Xenopol’s thought in the context of the debates of his time, as well as his major economic ideas that place him amongst the most renowned Romanian economists.

Nicolae Bălcescu (1819-1852) was a politician, a historian, and a patriot who was in favor of economic and political emancipation for the Romanian people. Even though historical issues were of the utmost interest for him, he paid attention to sociology and economics as well. While analyzing the specific social structures in the Romania, he emphasized their causes, as well as the need for change towards the revolution seen as a historic necessity on the way towards progress. In this paper we present Bălcescu’s analytical approach of the economic issues, starting from two assumptions. The first one: economic backwardness by comparison to other countries. Bălcescu looked into the causes and issued political economy recommendations to insure economic development. The second one: at the core of the Romanian economic problem was the agrarian situation. Bălcescu studied the origins and the evolution of agricultural land ownership, as well as the status of peasantry.

Ștefan Zeletin is considered to be one of the greatest Romanian scholars in the interwar period. Interested in sociology, philosophy and economics, Zeletin built an ideatic universe which is difficult to define and place from an ideological point of view. Using sociological analysis, Zeletin looked into the origins of Romanian capitalism. The fact that his analysis seems so contemporary springs from putting it into context. In his times, the influence of the developed countries upon the Romanian society unfolded on the basis of the economic, social and political disparities unmistakably working against Romania. Nowadays the situation is relatively similar if we compare Romania’s level of development to that of most countries in the European Union. Moreover, the discrepancy between the economic changes in Zeletin’s time and the mentality of the majority of the population back then corresponds to the moral and social crisis which is currently affecting the Romanian society.

Bogdan Petriceicu Haşdeu (1838-1907) was a historian, a philologist, an economist, a poet and a politician from Bessarabia, a descendent of a family of scholars. He was one of the most representative Romanian personalities of the 19th century. In his economic works he discussed the issues of Romania’s economic development, both from an industrial and an agricultural viewpoint. As far as doctrine is concerned, he was a supporter of protectionism. The aim of the paper is to identify the specific characteristics of Haşdeu’s economic thinking and to analyze his main ideas from a historical point of view.

Petru Sebeşanu Aurelian was born in Slatina on December 13, 1833 and he died in Bucharest on January 24, 1909. He is one of the most prominent people in the 19th century Romania. Agricultural engineer, politician, and one of the greatest Romanian economists, Petru Sebeşanu Aurelian was a strong supporter of Romania’s progress and independence, both in practice, through his professional and political activity, and in theory, through the ideas he put across in his writings. Petru Sebeşanu Aurelian was an advocate of mercantilism and economic nationalism. He was especially concerned with the possible ways to reduce the economic gap between Romania and the more developed countries and considered that Romania’s economy had to rely upon agriculture, and yet not neglect industry. In this paper we will try to identify the main coordinates of the paradigm within which Aurelian laid down the solutions for Romanian’s modernization in his times.

Romania’s economic development in the interwar era has always generated fierce debates when it comes to economic ideology. There was an undisputed need to come up with a national strategy of development in order to insure and consolidate the country’s economic independence. The economists of those times clashed their ideas and covered the full range of doctrinarian approaches from rejecting the state intervention to adopting economic dirigisme as a state policy. The reality of the insufficient development of the national productive forces was the starting point, and there were numerous attempts to draw up a strategy to modernize Romania. The issues related to the genesis of the Romanian economy captures the interest of many a great economists liberals, such as Ştefan Zeletin and Mihail Manoilescu, social-democrats (Marxist) such as Lothar Rădăceanu and Şerban Voinea, or agrarians such as Virgil Madgearu and Ion Răducanu.

Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen is one of the most famous Romanian economists. From the point of view of the schools of economic thought, his writings are not part of the orthodox typology. An original and unconventional spirit, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen is at the same time an important representative of the mathematics economics and “a profoundly humane and wise philosopher” as Paul Samuelson described him. His work is so atypical especially given the way he analyses economic phenomena and processes seen in connection with the processes taking place in the immediate environment. The economic and philosophic concept of entropy, based upon the second law of thermodynamics, is indissolubly linked to Georgescu-Roegen’s name, him thus becoming a paradigm creator. In his turn, the term of bio-economics rests upon Georgescu-Roegen’s idea that there is an analogy between the biological and the economical worlds.

Karl Emil Maximilian Weber is well-known for his works in the fields of economics, sociology, epistemology, law, economic history, theology and philosophy. One of Marx’s great intellectual rivals, Weber was among the first to understand that human society has lost the religious dimension it once had and that it cannot progress without values, without faith in God. This is in fact the pillar of the modernity and contemporaneousness of Weber’s writings.

One of the most important liberal theorists of his time, Claude Frédéric Bastiat began as an economic journalist and lobbyist for the free-trade. It took him some years before he made the transition from journalist to theorist, when discovering he had both a facility for writing and some profound insights into how the free market operates. But then he ran out of time when his illness ended his life and he did not have time to flourish fully. Bastiat was indeed a superb writer. His brilliant and witty essays are remarkable to this very day. He was the first, and one of the very few, to be able to convincingly communicate the basic propositions of economics. Bastiat strongly believed that what was really needed was a science of economics that would explain the harmony of a free society. He made a major contribution to this end himself by publishing his incomplete magnum opus Harmonies of Political Economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A proponent of free-market liberalism, Friedrich A. Hayek made fundamental contributions in political theory, psychology, and economics. His significant intellectual contribution to a number of scholarly disciplines was mainly grounded in his critique of socialist economics. And Hayek's critique of socialism was grounded in his scientific understanding of economics. Many of his contributions are so remarkable that people still read them more than fifty years after they were written. Spontaneous order, also known as self-organization, is one of his major conceptual contributions. It is in fact the spontaneous emergence of order out of seeming chaos from a combination of selfinterested individuals who are not intentionally trying to create order through planning. Hayek is well known for his use of the concept of spontaneous order to praise the market, reject socialism, and argue that moral traditions are the products of evolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mainly known as a pioneer of the general equilibrium theory, French economist Leon Walras was also a thinker on human nature, mores, scientific inquiry and knowledge and a great defender of human freedoms and social justice. His normative economic ideas on the distribution of social wealth were developed in his works L'Économie politique et de la justice (1860) and Études d'économie sociale (1896). He dealt with property, land, and taxes, wealth and poverty, freedom and equality, justice and equity and built a social system around the individual, the state and the society by referring to general social conditions and particular personal positions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bureaucracy is not a recent phenomenon. Its beginnings go a long way back in history. Looking into the issue of bureaucracy is a good starting point for the study of two social systems - capitalism and socialism. Such an analysis must be built onto the comparison between profit based management and bureaucratic management. Weber and Mises are two important names to mention when talking about bureaucracy. They both authored studies on bureaucracy, (Weber - Economy and Society in 1922, and Mises - Bureaucracy in 1944 and 1962). However, they each approached the topic from completely different angles and reached completely different conclusions regarding the nature and consequences of bureaucracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The word luxury recurs and recurs in contemporary advertising as an attempt by retailers to imply exclusiveness, associated with expensiveness and rarity. It is an inducement to consumption. Yet, the concept is frequently used in a loose or clichéd manner in both everyday language and promotional discourse. Luxury goods have two formal features: they are refined and positively pleasing. Luxury goods fall under several categories: sustenance (food and drink), shelter, clothing (apparel and accessories like jewelry and perfume) and leisure (entertainment and sporting goods). The standard definition of basic needs will include food, dwelling, and clothing. Needs, unlike wants, are objective or universal. Wants, unlike needs, are intentional. Unbalanced desires are insatiable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Definitely one of the most controversial terms in recent history, globalization (also spelt globalisation) was called "the most abused word of the 21st century" by The Economist. Many authors fear that it is bound to become the cliché of our times. The concept behind the word radiates such a multiplicity of phenomena that in time it has received a tremendous number of definitions given by various people in various contexts having various purposes in mind. The concept of globalization is relatively new compared to the process or historical trend of globalization which dates a long time back in the history of mankind. Thomas Friedman, author and New York Times columnist, perceives globalization as the chief force shaping and moulding the world today. Globalization is a word used in Anglo-Saxon literature. The Francophone literature uses another term - mondialisation. Though often treated as synonyms, in French, globalization is seen as a stage following mondialisation, a stage that implies the dissolution of national identities and the abolishment of borders inside the world network of economic exchanges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International financial services in their most basic conceivable forms have been provided, in one form or another, for at least two millennia. The growth of international finance as we know it (financial services, institutions and markets) has been shaped by history in response to requirements for capital specific to different times and different places. In early times, when there was no infrastructure, no central banking, and no financial regulation, merchants and bankers worked alone and had great difficulty in raising funds for their investments. They eventually diversified their sources of funds (to royalty, church, landed aristocracy and wealthy professionals) and began collaborating with partners in other locations. These early impulses resulted in incipient clusters of financial expertise that were later to evolve into what we call international financial centers (IFCs) nowadays. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]