Don Patinkin’s Contribution to Economics in Israel

Abstract

Don Patinkin is the man who almost single-handedly established Israeli Economics as an academic discipline and, at the same time, showed how this discipline could be applied to the analysis of Israel’s pressing economic problems. While making major contributions to monetary and macroeconomic theory, he trained a generation of students who soon spread out into the government and the media. Simultaneously teaching and educating a small group of graduate students, who were sent to complete their Ph.D. studies abroad, he laid the foundations of an Economics Department at the Hebrew University. A decade later this department would seed departments of economics and business in four other universities established in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Finally, in his pioneering empirical study, Monetary and Price Developments in Israel: 1949–1953, and in the more modest volume The Israeli Economy — The First Decade, he set the pattern for empirical research on the Israeli economy, which, as Director of the Falk Institute, he promoted and directed for over a decade.