IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/oxecpp/v40y1988i2p269-88.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The Contrasting Theories of Industrialization of Francois Quesnay and Adam Smith

Author

Listed:
  • Eltis, Walter

Abstract

Francois Quesnay regarded industry as "sterile," and argued that proindustrial government policies reduced population and undermined government finances, while Adam Smith saw immense benefits in the div ision of labor that could only be exploited in industry. Their theories are explained from the original texts, where both advocated that the balance between agriculture and industry should be left to market forces: Quesnay did not support agricultural protection, while Smith did not support infant industry protection. Quesnay's argument that it undermines government finances to tax a surplus-yielding agriculture in order to subsidize surplus-absorbing industries is one that many developing countries that are growing disappointingly slowly could profit from. Copyright 1988 by Royal Economic Society.

Suggested Citation

  • Eltis, Walter, 1988. "The Contrasting Theories of Industrialization of Francois Quesnay and Adam Smith," Oxford Economic Papers, Oxford University Press, vol. 40(2), pages 269-288, June.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:oxecpp:v:40:y:1988:i:2:p:269-88
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0030-7653%28198806%292%3A40%3A2%3C269%3ATCTOIO%3E2.0.CO%3B2-6&origin=bc
    File Function: full text
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to JSTOR subscribers. See http://www.jstor.org for details.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Akbar Noman, 1991. "Industrial Development and Efficiency in Pakistan: A Revisionist Overview," The Pakistan Development Review, Pakistan Institute of Development Economics, vol. 30(4), pages 849-861.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:oxecpp:v:40:y:1988:i:2:p:269-88. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/oep .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.