HABERLER, GOTTFRIED VON

born July 20, 1900, Purkersdorf, Vienna, Austria-Hungary [now in Austria] died May 6, 1995, Washington, D.C., U.S. Austrian-born American economist, writer, and educator whose major field of expertise was international trade. Haberler graduated from the University of Vienna in 1923, receiving his doctorate in 1925. After studies in London and the United States, he taught economics and statistics at the University of Vienna from 1928 to 1936. He also served as consultant to the League of Nations during his last two years in Vienna. In 1936 he accepted a professorship of economics at Harvard University, a post he held until 1971, when he joined the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. Haberler became famous chiefly as a writer on international trade, and his major work The Theory of International Trade (1937) is widely regarded as a classic. Particularly influential was his reformulation of the theory of comparative costs in terms of opportunity cost. Haberler also helped to revive the influence of the purchasing power parity doctrine, which states that relative price levels are major determinants of equilibrium exchange rates. He produced influential work on the flexibility and stability of exchange rates as well as on tariffs. His marked ability to synthesize the important elements in economic literature was also apparent in a classic study of business cycle theory that he wrote for the League of Nations, Prosperity and Depression (1937).