Saddened by the death of another Nobel Prize winner

Already in the 1960s, when the degree of openness of international capital markets was quite low, Mundell predicted the problems that would confront economic life today: for example, how would different exchange rate policies across countries affect the application of fiscal and monetary policy as the process of international capital integration accelerated?

Robert A. Mundell

The Economist Circle has learned from several sources that Robert A. Mundell, winner of the 1999 Nobel Prize in Economics, died in Italy on April 4, Beijing time, at the age of 88.

Mundell was the perfect combination of theoretical genius, algebraic (especially geometric) clarity, cultural sensitivity and immeasurable practical impact. His articles published in journals in the 1950s and 1960s were described in a Forbes article as being like Zeus and quite unlike anything else in the field. They are reprinted chapters of his 1956 MIT paper. They came out bit by bit, as George Stigler later put it.

It was clear to everyone: "Mundell dominated international trade theory in the 1960s."

Robert A. Mundell, born in October 1932 in Ontario, Canada, is the winner of the 1999 Nobel Prize in Economics, the founder of the "optimal currency area theory", and is known as the "father of the euro. He is also known as the "father of the euro".

After graduating from the University of British Columbia and the University of Washington, he attended graduate school at the London School of Economics and received his Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1956. From 1966 to 1971, he was Chair Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago and editor of the Journal of Political Economy. He was promoted to University Professor in 2001.

As of 2021, Robert Mundell has been awarded honorary professorships and honorary doctorates by more than 50 universities and has served as an advisor to a number of international institutions and organizations, including the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the European Commission, the U.S. Federal Reserve, and the U.S. Treasury Department.

Specifically, Mundell's great contributions to economics are the Mundell-Fleming model and the theory of optimal monetary regions.

There is nothing better known in China than the "Impossible Triangle". Impossible trinity refers to the dilemma of choosing economic, social, fiscal and financial policy objectives, which makes it difficult to obtain all three objectives at the same time. In the case of financial policy, it is also impossible to have all three: free flow of capital, fixed exchange rate and monetary policy independence.