EAEPE's Honorary Presidents are amongst the finest economists and crtitical thinkers of the 20th century. EAEPE promotes their ideas and the fact that these leading figures act as patrons to the association reflects EAEPE's position as an important association promoting critical thought in the social sciences.

Janos Kornai was among the first to initiate the use of mathematical methods in economic planning. He became widely known for his early criticism of central economic planning in command economies, pointing to systemic flaws in the institutional set-up in the Eastern European communist states. In his seminal work Anti-Equilibrium (Amsterdam: North-Holland) published in 1971, he sharply criticised Walrasian neoclassical economics. This book was the intellectual starting point for his critical work on command economies. His autobiography has been published in January 2007 under the title By the Force of Thought: Irregular Memoirs of an Intellectual Journey (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).

Richard Nelson is one of the worlds leading scholars in the field of technical change. Together with Sidney Winter he has been leading the way for a renaissance of Schumpeterian ideas in the study of technical change, innovation and growth. Their book, An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), published in 1982, has had an enormous impact. It is now a standard reference for every scholar working in the field of economic growth and innovation.

Douglass North is one of the leading economic historians and institutionalist economists. From early on his research focused on the role of institutions for economic development. His main books include Structure and Change in Economic History (New York: W.W. Norton), published in 1981, Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), published in 1990, and more recently, Understanding the Process of Economic Change (Princeton: Princeton University Press), published in 2005. For these seminal contributions he was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 1993.

Luigi Pasinetti is an eminent critical economists. He has contributed substantially to the Neo-Ricardian as well as the Post-Keynesian Theory. He is best know for his leading role in the Cambridge-Cambridge controversy on capital theory, where the theorists from Cambridge UK (amongst others including people like Joan Robinson, Piero Garegnani or Piero Sraffa) showed to the economists in Cambridge Mass. (Paul Samuelson, Robert Solow, David Levhari, amongst others) with ultimate rigour that the mainstream approach to the theory of value, production and distribution is logically inconsistent except for limit cases. His well-known books include Lectures on the Theory of Production (London: Macmillan), published in 1977, Structural Change and Economic Growth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), published in 1981, and Structural Economic Dynamics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), published in 1993.

Past Honorary President

Kurt Rothschild (1914-2010) was known as an important early contributor to Post-Keynesian theory. His work spanned a wide array of topics. He was probably best known for his research on price theory and oligopoly as well as his contributions to the theory of wages and unemployment, from his 1954 book, The Theory of Wages (Oxford: Blackwell), to the collection of essays published in 1993, Employment, Wages and Income Distribution (London: Routledge). Books like Ethics in Economic Theory (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar), also published in 1993, are testimony to his outstanding scholarship and critical thinking. Read here an interview with Prof. Rothschild.