Profile Major Works Resources

Grigorii Alexandrovich Fel'dman, 1884-1958 

Soviet Jewish electrical engineer and founder of Marxian economic growth theory.  Grigory Fel'dman worked at the Soviet Gosplan ministry from 1923 to 1931. 

In 1928, Fel'dman introduced two-sector growth models to analyze the impact of growth on economic structure. Two theorems are attached to his name.  Fel'dman's first theorem relates the overall rate of economic growth to the relative size of the capital stocks in producer and consumer goods sectors.  Fel'dman's second theorem proposes that to maintain any given level of growth, investment must be allocated among sectors in the same proportion as the capital stock ratios.  Fel'dman was eventually purged by Stalin and shot.  

Fel'dman's impact outside the Soviet Union was not insubstantial.  His work was highly influential on Adolph Lowe and the Kiel School.   There is indeed a formal equivalence between his work and that of the Indian planning economist P.C. Mahalanobis.  A very useful presentation of Fel'dman's work can be found in Domar (1957).   

 

  

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Major Works of Gregory Fel'dman

  • "Reflections on the Structure and Dynamics of the National Economy of the USA from 1850 to 1925 and of the USSR from 1926-27 to 1940-41", 1927, Planovoe khozyaistvo
  • "On the Theory of Rates of Growth of the National Income", 1928, Planovoe khozyaistvo.
  • "The USSR and the World Economy on the Eve of the Second Year of the Five Year Plan", 1929, Planovoe khozyaistvo.
  • "On the Limits of Industrialization", 1929, Planovoe khozyaistvo.
  • "An Analytical Method for Constructive Perspective Plans", 1929, Planovoe khozyaistvo.
  • "Problems of Electrification at a New Stage", 1930, Na novom etape sotsialisticheskogo stroitel'stva.
HET

 
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Resources on Gregory Fel'dman

  •  Essays in the Theory of Economic Growth, by Evsey Domar  1957.

 

 
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