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Ex Ante and Ex Post

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Abstract

The concepts of ex ante and ex post are the most popular terminological innovations developed by the famous so-called Stockholm School in the 1930s. The terminology was introduced into macroeconomic theory, especially with regard to the savings-investment relation by Gunnar Myrdal (1933, 1939) and clarified and incorporated into sequence or period analysis by Erik Lindahl (1934, 1939b), whose conceptual system of ‘prospective’ and ‘retrospective’ values achieved ‘world-citizenship’ as a method for drawing up national budgets (Hansen 1951, p. 27). The popularization of the method of ex ante and ex post is due to Ohlin’s seminal articles on the Stockholm School (1937) which made it ‘generally accepted over the whole world with a rapidity unusual to economics’ (Palander 1941, p. 34).

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Steiger, O. (2018). Ex Ante and Ex Post. In: The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95189-5_315

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