Origins of Terms in International Economics

Here I record what I have been able to learn about the origins of some of the terms we use in international economics, both who introduced their meanings and who first gave them their names, if those are not the same people. If the answers to both are included in the Glossary entry itself, then I don't bother with it here (e.g., absorption approach)

If I attribute a concept or the term for it to a particular author, that means I have personally checked the source and seen it used there in the way that I describe. However, if I say or imply that this was the first use of a concept or term, I obviously cannot always know that for certain. For most of these, I have searched in Google Scholar to find the first use of the term identified there. Google Scholar allows one to search a range of years, which is helpful, but not always correct, requiring some care. But I don't know how complete that tool is (it seems remarkably good), and in any case I can't find who may have used a term orally with their colleagues or students without publishing it earlier. If you know of prior uses that should be mentioned, please let me know, preferably by e-mail to alandear@umich.edu.

More recently -- 2024 and after researching a large number of these -- I have found that I can use regular Google, instead of Google Scholar, to search by date. I don't know how Google identifies dates, however, but this too has been useful on occasion. Finally, since neither of these sources seems to capture the news sources that I subscribe to -- Economist, Financial Times, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal -- I now may search them as well. Unfortunately for my purposes, New York Times is the only one that seems to allow me to search far back in time. The others only cover fairly recent years, which is not very helpful.


Index of Origins

Aggressive unilateralism
Anti-dumping
Asian Tigers
Atlas method
Balance of trade
Banana republic
Beggar thy neighbor
Belt and Road Initiative
Benign neglect
Blood diamonds
Boycott
Brain drain
Canonical model of currency crises
Carousel approach
Carry trade
CES function
Comparative advantage
Concertina tariff reduction
Conflict diamonds
Consumer surplus
Continuum of goods
Convergence play
Currency area
Deadweight loss
Depression
dirty tariffication
Diversification cone
Dixit-Stiglitz utility
Dumping
Dutch disease
Edgeworth-Bowley box
Emerging market
Flying Geese
Fragmentation
Gravity model
Great Moderation
Grexit
Harberger triangle
Hirschman index
Holy Trinity
Home market effect
Hub and spoke integration
Ideal price index
Immiserizing growth
Impossible Trinity
Inconsistent Trinity
Infant industry protection
Intermestic
J-Curve
Kaldor-Hicks criterion
Leontief Paradox
Lerner diagram
Lerner paradox
Level playing field
Lump of labor fallacy
Marshall-Lerner condition
Meade Index
Metzler paradox
Mirror statistics
Most Favored Nation
New new trade theory
New trade theory
Normal Trade Relations
Odious debt
Offer curve
Ohlin definition
Optimal tariff
Paradox of Plenty
Pauper labor argument
Peso problem
Policy space
Precautionary Principle
Price-specie flow mechanism
Producer surplus
Purchasing power parity
Rent seeking
Resource curse
Second-best argument for protection
Seigniorage
Social dumping
Special Drawing Right
Splinternet
Stylized fact
Tariffication
Technology gap model
Terms of trade
Thank-you note
Third World
Tiger economy
Trade deflection
Transnational corporation
Trilemma
Variable geometry
Vent for surplus
Water in the tariff

Aggressive unilateralism
The term itself appeared three times prior to 1990, in writings by Carlton and Bixler 1962, Carlton 1963-64, and Etzold 1982, but always in the non-economic context of the Cold War and military conflict. For example, Carlton and Bixler worried that the American right wing would "come to power in the United States and build a garrison state, pursue policies of aggressive unilateralism, ...."

In the context of economics and trade policy, the term was coined by Bhagwati (1990), who also used it that same year as the title of a volume that he edited with Hugh Patrick.

Asian Tigers, Tiger economy
I've not been able to track down the first use of this term to refer to the foursome of Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan. Everywhere I've seen the term used in writing, the author seems to assume that it is already familiar. The earliest source for "Asian Tigers" in Google Scholar is a book first published in 1983, but I've found only the much later 8th edition, and I suspect that the term did not appear in much earlier editions.

Google also finds a mention of tiger economies in a paper on Southeast Asia in the 1985 Philippine Journal of Third World Studies, but I haven't been able to access that journal to see if they are named there. I suspect not.

So the earliest explicit use of Asian Tigers to mean these four countries seems to be in 1987, and in that year it appeared twice. Rabushka (1987) had the following: "The four Asian Tigers -- Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, and Korea -- are renown [sic] as the hyper-growth economies of the Pacific Rim." and Griffith (1987) had

    And recently, neo-classical economic thinkers are citing the economic success of the Asian Tigers - Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and South Korea - as empirical evidence that an export-oriented strategy of development tends to be positively correlated with better growth.
Atlas method
The Atlas method got its name from its use in the World Bank Atlas, more recent editions of which are called the Atlas of Global Development.

The current method seems to have been used first in the 1985 edition of the Atlas, where it said "...the procedures for estimating gnp in U.S. dollars differ from those used in previous years." Previous editions had used average prices and exchange rates from a three-year base period, whereas the new procedure was to use "the simple average of the exchange rates for the current year and for the two preceding years; the latter two exchange rates are adjusted for differences between domestic and U.S. inflation." The most important difference between the new and old methods was that the old one used a different conversion for a given year in successive editions of the Atlas, making comparisons difficult. I am unable, from reading details of the prior procedure, to tell whether the new one also causes other differences. In any case, it seems that the subsequent use by others of the Atlas method has been to use the method introduced in World Bank (1985).

In an effort to determine whether the Atlas method had a prior history, I have used Google Scholar to search for Atlas method over various years. The term itself was used with other meanings prior to its use by the World Bank, as well as subsequently: a method of measuring the maturity of skeletons; a method in meteorology for detecting weather events; a tool for measuring the "HLB value of a reagent," whatever that is, by Atlas Chemical Industries; and an exercise program by body builder Charles Atlas.

The earliest mentions of the World Bank's Atlas method were in 1980, where I found two. One of these (by M.Y. Smith, "Romania: forecasting and development," in Futures) mentioned "following the World Bank Atlas method of adjusting official Romanian national accounts data." The second (by Davies, Grawe, and Kavalsky, "Poverty and the Development of Human Resources: Regional Perspectives," World Bank) had a table of GNP per capita data labeled "IBRD Atlas method, US dollars."

From these it appears that the term Atlas method predated the version of World Bank (1985) and referred to the method used in prior editions, which seems to have been slightly different.

Balance of trade
Price (1905) examined the origins of this concept, the exact wording of which appeared in 1615 and the concept of which, without the wording, can be found as early as 1381 in England, when writers were concerned that by importing a greater value than it was exporting, England was losing money -- i.e., gold and silver. Somewhat before the term balance of trade appeared, similar concerns were said in 1601 to be due to "overbalancing of foreign commodities." From the discussion by Price, it appears that balance of trade in this early use referred to a situation in which values of exports and imports were equal, rather than today's use measuring the extent to which they are unequal.

Fetter (1935) dated the term to 1623, apparently disagreeing with Price that its use in 1615 was comparable. His main concerns were with the common attribution that a positive balance of trade is "favorable" and with whether the term includes only trade in goods or instead extends beyond that to include other payments such as we today would include in the balance on current account or even balance of payments. It appears that early writings used the term variously in each of these senses.

[I was alerted to the articles by Price and Fetter by Obstfeld (2012).]

Banana republic
As explained nicely in Economist (2013), the term was coined by the writer O. Henry in a short story in 1904, set in a fictional land he described as a "small, maritime banana republic." He was living at the time in Honduras, on which he must have based his description. Honduras was and remains one of the countries that rely heavily on plantations of bananas, owned by what was then the United Fruit Company, now called Chiquita.

Beggar thy neighbor
It has become commonplace, at least in the literature of economics, to describe policies that decrease imports as beggar thy neighbor policies. These policies include most obviously increases in import tariffs and artificial depreciation of currencies. The basis for this label is that these policies can benefit the home country only by hurting its trading partners. Today we most commonly interpret those effects as changes in overall economic welfare, but historically the term was first used during the Great Depression, when the effects were on employment.

The origin of the term was nicely discussed by Weisman (2009), who credited it to Joan Robinson (1937), whom he thanked "for such a vivid phrase." He also pointed out that she likely got the phrase from a 19th century card game, Beggar My Neighbor, of which he said the "first literary appearance ... was in the novel Great Expectations, published in 1861" by Charles Dickens. That is especially plausible given that Robinson herself never used the term beggar thy neighbor, but only >beggar my neighbor. It appears in the title of her essay, "Beggar-my-Neighbour Remedies for Unemployment," and in several passages as the "game of beggar-my-neighbour," such as (p. 156):

    In times of general unemployment a game of beggar-my-neighbour is played between the nations, each one endeavouring to throw a larger share of the burden upon the others. As soon as one succeeds in increasing its trade balance at the expense of the rest, others retaliate, and the total volume of international trade sinks continuously, relatively to the total volume of world activity.
However, as I search for uses of both these terms in Google Scholar, I find beggar my neighbor used several times prior to Robinson, no doubt also motivated by the card game. Indeed, Gerard (1882) was a novel titled Beggar My Neighbour, whose chapters refer to a card game, though a different one than I had found described online. Even earlier than Dickens, Google Scholar finds a passage from 1839, in a work about photography, that mentioned critically "the universal game of 'beggar my neighbor'." Also using the card game as a metaphor for destructive competition, other authors used the term beggar my neighbor for competition on Wall Street (Armstrong 1848), political party competition in England (Norris 1898), and international competition to build up armaments (Everett 1895, England 1916). Source

The first use of the term that I can find in a context of international trade showed up in an un-authored piece, perhaps an editorial, in the Honolulu, Hawaii, Daily Herald, June 3, 1887. An article titled "The Sugar Industry" discussed how multiple countries were exporting sugar at below their domestic prices and less than the cost of production (what today we would call dumping), "the idea apparently being to ruin the British refiner at the expense of the foreign taxpayer." Before that it says, "It is a singular game to play something like that known as beggar my neighbor." While the context was trade, the objective was clearly not what we would mean by it today.

The first clear use of the term with today's trade meaning preceded Robinson (1937) and was by Reynolds (1934, p. 180):

    The return of prosperity to Germany is dependent on foreign trade. But, the countries of the world are still engaged in the pastime of "beggar my neighbor," played with tariff walls, exchange restrictions and the rest of it, and Germany is playing it at least as hard as anyone else.
Similarly, Elliott (1937) used the term in praising the trade policies of Cordell Hull and arguing against criticism of Hull by George Peek, who was President of the Export-Import Bank. Elliott said (p. 28):
    For many years the Republican apologists have been talking mercantilism of the crudest sort, measuring our prosperity in terms of an excess of exports and welcoming the draining of the rest of the world of gold. This "Beggar my-neighbor" policy has been revived by Mr. Peek, who proposes in effect to come to direct barter on a simple two-party basis.
The first of these clearly preceded Robinson (1937), and the second may have also, although as Robinson's book was a collection of essays, hers may have been published separately earlier.

It is therefore not certain that Robinson should have the credit that Weisman gives her for introducing the term beggar my neighbor (not beggar thy neighbor) to the literature on international trade. But to the extent that the term caught on, it does seem likely that Robinson's greater visibility compared to Reynolds and Elliott would have been the cause.

And catch on it did. In the decade 1940-49, Google Scholar finds at least 18 articles including beggar my neighbor in the context of international trade, including six in the American Economic Review. The peak was five articles in 1947.

But that is not the term that is most widely used today. Instead beggar thy neighbor has largely replaced beggar my neighbor, as we can see from Google's NGram of the two terms:

The surge in appearances of beggar my neighbor in the 1800s presumably reflects the popularity of the card game, which then declined. One sees the rise in its use in the 1930s and 1940s, perhaps showing its rise in the context of international trade, which took off even more in the 1950s and 1960s. But beggar thy neighbor appeared for the first time in the 1940s, then took off in the late 1960s, and it has dominated beggar my neighbor ever since.

Searching for appearances of beggar thy neighbor in Google Scholar, the first I find is Berge (1946, p. 687) who wrote, in discussing the Great Depression:

    New tariffs appeared, more cartels were formed, systems of national barter through bilateral pacts, selective attack by dumping, and all the other stratagems common to beggar thy neighbor policies were brought into play.
Why Berge replaced "my" with "thy" I do not know, though perhaps the latter had somehow replaced the former in oral discussion. He was writing in the journal Law and Contemporary Problems, which seems unlikely to have influenced those writing on the economics of international trade, even though it is clear from the passage that he had a good understanding of trade policy.

It was not until the early 1950s that beggar thy neighbor began to appear in the economics literature, first by Hildebrand and Mace (1950) in Review of Economics and Statistics and then by Kindleberger and Despres (1952) in American Economic Review. The latter included (p. 332)

    The two guiding principles were that no country should be prevented by balance-of-payments difficulties from pursuing domestic policies of full employment, and that no country should be permitted to adopt "beggar-thy-neighbor" measures for exporting unemployment.
I'm inclined to think that it was Kindleberger's use of the term that prompted its use by others, partly because this appeared in the AER Papers and Proceedings with its large audience, and partly because Kindleberger himself was so widely regarded.

But why did he or someone else feel the need to change beggar my neighbor into beggar thy neighbor? I can only offer my own speculation, which others may find either obvious or silly:

The card game that seems to have started all of this was all about deliberately eliminating the other players in order to win the game. So beggaring one's neighbor was not only the object, but something to be applauded. Thus it was desirable for one to focus approvingly on the negative effects one could have on one's own, i,e. "my," neighbor. But as the game came to be used as a metaphor for destructive competition, the focus shifted to the negative effects that others would have on ourselves, and therefore the perspective moved to that of the neighbors. Beggar thy neighbor therefore speaks disapprovingly from the neighbor's point of view and stresses that negative connotation.

As the NGram chart above shows, beggar my neighbor has not entirely disappeared. And while economists generally disapprove of uses of trade and exchange rate policies to benefit oneself at the expense of others, there are undoubtedly some who still -- from a nationalist perspective and discounting the likelihood of retaliation -- favor such actions. It would be interesting to see whether current uses of beggar my neighbor tend to correlate with that point of view. Perhaps those who use beggar my neighbor in the context of international trade continue to see trade as a zero sum game, which the original Beggar My Neighbor game certainly was, while those who recognize that international trade is a positive sum game have shifted to beggar thy neighbor.

Belt and Road Initiative
China's President Xi announced the beginnings of what is now called the Belt and Road Initiative in 2013 visits to Kazakhstan and Indonesia. It ultimately was to include two parts. The Silk Road Economic Belt, announced in 2013, would be a network of rail, pipelines, and roads together with improved border crossings through Central Asia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. The Maritime Silk Road, announced a bit later at a summit of ASEAN, would consist of development of ports in Southeast Asia, the Indian Ocean, East Africa, and even Europe.

Together these two parts were named One Belt, One Road. The purpose was not just to facilitate greater trade between China and other countries, but also to increase China's influence in those countries and even to foster greater use of the Chinese currency.

The change to calling it the Belt and Road Initiative in English is explained in this passage from The Economist, June 11, 2022:

    With the BRI, naming had proved a problem. To Western ears, "One Belt, One Road", as it was originally called, sounded inflexible: a China-centric view of how the world's infrastructure should be built. Apparently to help allay such concerns, the English name was changed in 2015. In Chinese, it remained the same.
Source

Benign neglect
This term cropped up only occasionally prior to 1970, and never in reference to policies regarding the balance of payments. Google Scholar finds it less than once a decade during 1800-1899 and less than once a year during 1900-1969, on topics as diverse as public interest law, African newspapers, and spiders. One source credited the term to "Earl of Dunham's prescription in 1839 for the proper British attitude toward Canada."

Then suddenly in 1970, Google Scholar finds 100 occurrences of the term in that year alone, though still never in an international economic context. This explosion of uses of the term followed wide reporting of a memo by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, counselor to President Nixon. Moynihan wrote:

    The time may have come when the issue of race could benefit from a period of 'benign neglect.' The subject has been too much talked about. The forum has been too much taken over by hysterics, paranoids, and boodlers on all sides. We may need a period in which Negro progress continues and racial rhetoric fades. Source
This memo prompted wide and critical discussion, and at the same time it offered the term benign neglect as a handy way of describing all sorts of policies, by Nixon and others, with some emphasizing the benign aspect and others focusing more on the neglect. It seems likely that discussions of balance of payments policy adopted the term in 1971 because it was circulating for these other purposes, and because it fit well with what appeared to be US policy on that front at that time.

In 1971 there were at least nine uses of the term benign neglect with the meaning used here: that the US either was doing or should have been doing nothing about its balance of payments deficit, leaving policy responses to other countries. Many of the authors who used the term put it in quotation marks, but none of them said whom they were quoting, if anybody. Many were critical of the policy itself, referring to "experts" or "economists" who advocated the policy, but mostly without naming them.

The policy of benign neglect, but without that name, was attributed by Halm (1968) to Despres, Kindleberger, and Salant (1966). According to Halm, p. 1:

    In an article "The Dollar and World Liquidity. A Minority View," published in The Economist of February 5, 1966, Emile Despres, Charles P. Kindleberger, and Walter S. Salant challenge what they call "the consensus": the belief that the payments deficit of the United States must be eliminated to recreate confidence in the international payments system, and that some way must be found of making the supply of world liquidity independent from a further growth of foreign-held dollar balances. ... [Instead, the] balance-of-payments deficit of the United States is the perfectly normal result of America's role as international financial intermediary.
Despres et al. themselves did not state their view quite so simply, and instead of saying that the US did not need to correct the balance of payments, as the benign neglect policy seems to imply, their point was that US efforts to do so would either be harmful or would not work:
    An attempt to halt the capital outflow by raising interest rates in the United States either would have little effect over any prolonged period or else would cripple European growth. The effort is now being made to "correct the deficit" by restricting capital movements. Success in this effort is dubious ... ."

After discussing this "minority view" extensively, Halm concluded that "The solution suggested by the minority view suffers from several weaknesses, which make it unlikely that it can supplant or even decisively influence the majority view," and he went on to list 12 "points of contention."

Later writers more frequently credited the policy, though again not the name, to Krause (1970) who advocated "A Passive Balance-of-Payments Strategy for the United States" in an article with that title in Brookings Papers on Economic Activity. Krause too, however, made no use at all of the words "benign" or "neglect." Instead, it seems to have been Haberler and Willett (1971), also arguing for a "passive balance of payments policy," who then went on describe it as a "policy of benign neglect":

    A passive attitude towards the balance of payments can be described as a "policy of benign neglect." It should be observed, however, that neglect of the balance of payments does not imply neglect of either the interests of the U.S. or of those of our trading partners.
They went on to argue at length for this policy, and they repeatedly insisted that it would not be a selfish policy and would not hurt other countries.

Rather surprisingly, neither Krause nor Haberler and Willet cited either Depres et al. (1966) or Halm (1968), even though the policy they advocated seems the same as that of the former. The Haberler and Willett paper was dated January 1, 1971, only a few months after Krause, and neither of these papers mentioned the other. So it appears that they may have arrived independently at the same policy recommendation both as each other and as Depres et al.

As for calling it the policy of benign neglect, that seems to have originated with Haberler and Willet. Halm in his title had mentioned "deficits benign and malignant," but it does not appear that Haberler and Willet took the word "benign" from him, since they do not cite him. Instead, I conclude that Haberler and Willet were the first to apply the already familiar term benign neglect to US balance of payments policy.

Blood diamonds, Conflict diamonds,
These two terms are both used to mean "rough diamonds used by rebel movements or their allies to finance armed conflicts aimed at undermining legitimate governments," according to the website of the Kimberly Process, which initiated a mechanism to prevent them being traded. Another source goes on to say "These diamonds are often mined using forced labor, including children, and are traded illegally to fund violent conflicts and human rights abuses." [Source]

The organization Global Witness was the first to draw attention to this issue in its 1998 report, "A Rough Trade". That report, however, did not use either of these terms, even though it used the word "conflict" numerous times.

Brittanica and others seems to give credit to the United Nations for coining the term:

    Blood diamond, as defined by the United Nations (UN), [is] any diamond that is mined in areas controlled by forces opposed to the legitimate, internationally recognized government of a country and that is sold to fund military action against that government.
    The very specific UN definition of blood diamonds was formulated during the 1990s, when brutal civil wars were being waged in parts of western and central Africa by rebel groups based in diamond-rich areas of their countries. [Source]
However, I have not been able to find any UN documents in the 1990s using the term.

The earliest I find from the UN was a press release of December 1, 2000. It included "conflict diamonds" 66 times (and "blood diamonds" only once, the latter reporting a contribution by Argentina). As early as 1997, the UN Security Council began adopting resolutions concerning the situation in African countries and the problems of trade in diamonds, notably in Angola. But only in March 2001 did its resolutions begin referring to conflict diamonds, and they never mentioned blood diamonds.

It seems, therefore, that while concern about the phenomenon began in the 1990s, use of the terms began only in 2000. To confirm that the terms were not used prior to 2000, I used Google Scholar to search for them in prior years. While that process is not perfect, I was not able to confirm any use of either term in 1999 or before. Searching in the year 2000 alone, however, I found 43 appearances of conflict diamonds, so that term clearly took off. Similarly, I found 23 appearances of blood diamonds in 2000. As is often the case with Google Scholar searches, some of the appearances in both cases were mis-dated, but I was able to confirm that most of them were truly in 2000. With that many, it seems unlikely that they were prompted by the use of the terms by the UN, at least not by that press release from December 2000.

It appears, therefore, that whatever role the UN may have played in using these terms, the public picked both of them up in 2000, and I cannot pinpoint who really coined them. One source in October 2000 mentioned "the coining by the media and advocacy groups of the concept of 'blood diamonds' (i.e., diamonds procured in and through intrastate conflicts)". [Source]

The term conflict diamonds was pretty clearly used first, but blood diamonds followed quickly and soon surpassed it, as the following NGram chart demonstrates:

I should note that it was not until a few years later that the term was further popularized in the title of the movie Blood Diamond which appeared in 2006.

Boycott
Very nicely explained by Mulder (2022, p. 37):
    The term originated in a famous case in 1880 in which the Irish Land League, which fought for the rights of landless peasants, used a policy of non-interaction to pressure Charles Boycott, the despotic agent of an absentee landlord, into making concessions to rural tenants. Soon his name was widely used as a noun and verb; it entered the French language one year later and by the end of the decade was used in Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Swedish, German, Dutch, and even several Asian languages.

Brain drain
It seems clear that this term, as meaning the emigration highly trained people, was introduced in a committee report commissioned by the UK Royal Society in 1963. Cervantes and Guellec (2002) say:
    In fact, the British Royal Society first coined the expression "brain drain" to describe the outflow of scientists and technologists to the United States and Canada in the 1950s and early 1960s.
I have so far been unable to access the Royal Society report in order to quote it directly.

My search for use of the term prior to 1963 fails to find any use of the term with this meaning, and the few uses that I do find are in a medical context about drainage from the brain. Then in 1963 I find several uses of the term in the emigration context, some including it in quotation marks suggesting that it was recently introduced. Searches after 1963 find it surging in frequency, as is also indicated by the following Google N-gram graph:

Canonical model of currency crises
Krugman (1997a) gave credit for this model, which he seemed in this source to be the first to call the canonical model, to apparently unpublished "work done in the mid-1970s by Stephen Salant, at that time at the Federal Reserve's International Finance Section." Salant focused on schemes to stabilize commodity prices, as described briefly in Salant and Henderson (1978). There it was applied to the market for gold. Krugman then drew on that work for his model of currency crises in Krugman (1979b), and it was refined by Flood and Garber (1984).

Carousel approach
Also called carousel retaliation, this was introduced to US legislation in 1999 by a group of senators led by Mike DeWine of Ohio and a group of representatives led by Larry Combest of Texas. The Senate bill was "S. 1619, the Carousel Retaliation Act of 1999." I have not been able to locate that, but it seems to have been the first use of this term. The bill was a response to concern that the retaliatory tariffs used by USTR in the beef hormone case would not be effective, and it was introduced as an amendment to Section 301. The following year, the content of the bill, but not its name, was included in P.L. 106-200, May 18, 2000, the Trade and Development Act of 2000.

Since then, carousel has continued to be used in this context, including as a verb: "to carousel the tariffs." For for more on this history of the carousel approach, see Griffin (2019).

Carry trade
This term mystified me when I first learned it, and to some extent it still does. It means borrowing in one currency and lending in another so as to profit from a difference in interest rates. To me as a trade economist, this was not trade, since it does not involve exports or imports. And it was not obvious what is being carried. I now accept that purely financial transactions are often called trade -- trade in financial assets.

As for the "carry" part, I first thought that it referred to the "carrying cost" of holding the purchased bond, which is the interest paid on the one sold. But I've since learned that in financial markets more generally, not just international, a difference in interest rates that an actor exploits by both borrowing and lending is called the "carry." Thus if they can lend at a higher rate than they pay to borrow, that is called a "positive carry" while the opposite is a "negative carry". [Source]

That may be enough to explain why "carry trade" is used for international actions that I was taught were interest arbitrage, either covered or uncovered.

My search for the term "carry trade" did not find it at all with this meaning until 1996, even though such transactions must have been common long before. I learned from Eichengreen and others (e.g., Eichengreen and Mathieson (1998)) that similar actions in 1992 had been called convergence plays. This term, though more awkward, made more sense to me than carry trade since the traders in 1992 were acting on their expectation that interest rates in Europe would converge. This would increase the prices of the high-interest rate bonds and provide capital gains to their holders, in addition to the higher interest rate.

For a while, as my searches for "carry trade" found many occurrences of cash and carry trade, I suspected that this was an earlier term for carry trade that had later been shortened. But while my searches found several distinct meanings for "cash and carry trade," none were for what is now called carry trade. One of them, however, concerned actions in bond and futures markets, where again the "carry" was the interest rate differential.

My search for the two words "carry" and "trade" together found many uses of them with other meanings, most commonly referring to the carrying of traded goods. The earliest example was Decker (1749, p. 21) which included

    If the lower the Customs the greater the Trade, no Customs or Free-Ports must carry Trade to its utmost height; which Case might be ours.

I found carry trade with its current meaning first appearing in several news sources in 1996. The trade then was between Japan and the US, exploiting low interest rates in Japan and high in the US. The earliest I found was Wyatt (1996):

    Extremely low interest rates in Japan encouraged professional traders and some large institutional investors to make a complicated multimarket bet known as a carry trade, analysts said. By borrowing at rates as low as one-half of 1 percent in Japan, converting the yen into dollars and buying United States Treasuries that paid 5 percent or more, a trader could lock in easy profits. The trade worked as long as the dollar-yen relationship remained steady.

Then in 1997, I also found carry trade with its current meaning, now prompted by the role that it played in the Asian Financial Crisis. The earliest was: Fuerbringer (1997):

    Among the first to take the stage in the summertime drama were the bankers and treasurers, and a financial technique of theirs known by some as the carry trade.

    For years, because of rock-bottom interest rates in Japan and low rates in the United States, banks, investment houses and insurers had borrowed in yen and dollars and put the proceeds into short-term notes in Southeast Asia that were paying far higher rates. These are the so-called carry trades.

This nicely introduced the term, defined it, and seemed to attribute it to "bankers and treasurers."

I also found two other sources in 1997 that used carry trade in this sense, both in the publication Challenge. The first, Roach (1997, p. 104), mentioned two specific uses of carry trade, one in 1993:

    And fourth, there are the perils of highly leveraged crossborder arbitrage plays, as investors exploit disparities in liquidity and real economic conditions in the world's asynchronous financial markets; the fabled Federal Reserve carry trade of 1993 and the now-infamous yen carry trade of 1997 are classic examples in this regard.
I have so far failed to find any other mention of the "fabled" example from 1993, so I do not know whether others called it by this name.

A more recent discussion of carry trade was in Frankel (2013), who provided a "'Carry Trade' Model of Commodity Prices" motivated by work on commodity carrying costs by Working (1949) and others. He noted the following:

    The phrase "carry trade" is today primarily associated with speculation in international fixed-income markets, where the spot price of concern is the price of foreign exchange and the "cost of carry" is the international difference in interest rates. There is perhaps an irony here, because the original intuition comes from more tangible commodities, where the cost of carry includes storage costs (among other variables).
Although he said that the term is "primarily associated" with the use I'm discussing here, he did not cite any others actually using it for commodities, even though he was of course correct that it was likely motivated by carrying costs such as storage. I would quibble, however, with his point that the "cost of carry" here is the international difference in interest rates, rather than the single interest rate at which a carry trader borrows. The difference in interest rates is more plausibly the benefit, not the cost, of carry trade, and indeed it was that difference in interest rates that was first called the "carry" and gave rise to this terminology.

CES function
Arrow et al. (1961, pp. 225-226) described their empirical motivation to "derive a mathematical function having the properties of (i) homogeneity, (ii) constant elasticity between capital and labor, and (iii) the possibility of different elasticities for different industries." They named it the CES function and estimated it across industries and countries.

One of the co-authors, Minhas1962, tried to rename it the "homohypallagic" function, deriving from Greek homo=same and hypallage=substitution. He credited the idea for this name to Emmanuel G. Mesthene of the Rand Corporation. The name did not catch on.

Mukerji (1963) also tried to rename it the "SMAC function," using the initials of the four authors of Arrow et al. (1961) -- Solow, Minhas, Arrow, and Chenery -- but that too failed to catch on.

The CES function did not play a major role in international trade theory during the first decade or two after its introduction, perhaps because trade theorists had a proud tradition of deriving results without specifying functional forms. It came into its own, however, in the Dixit-Stiglitz function used by Krugman (1980) as central to incorporating monopolistic competition into the New Trade Theory. The innovation there was to make the number of products (interpreted as varieties) variable.

Comparative advantage
Ruffin (2002) credited the concept of comparative advantage and the law of comparative advantage to Ricardo (1951-1973), in a discovery that Ruffin dated to early October 1816. The law was developed in Ricardo's celebrated chapter on foreign trade, while the term comparative advantage seems to have first appeared in a later chapter (Ricardo (1951-1973), Vol I, p. 263). In crediting Ricardo, Ruffin disagreed with Chipman (1965) who credited Torrens (1815). From what I see in this debate, Torrens deserves credit for first stating the possibility that a country will import a good in which it has an absolute advantage, even though he seemed not to have recognized its importance, and he certainly did not work out the full conditions needed for this to happen, as Ricardo did.

Concertina tariff reduction
This term was introduced by Corden (1974, p. 370) who suggested it as an "optimal path of tariff reduction":
    One could construct an optimal path of tariff reduction. The high tariffs are squeezed down to medium level at the first stage, then these and the existing medium tariffs are squeezed down to a lower level, and so on, until eventually free trade has been attained. This can be called the concertina method.
Though not stated here, he was explicit that this should apply to effective rates of protection, not nominal tariffs.

Calling this the concertina method seems slightly inappropriate, as players of concertinas squeeze the instrument from both ends, not just one. Indeed, Gruen (1993, pp. 15-16) contrasts Corden's "'Tops down' reform, or what Corden has called 'concertina method' tariff dismantling" with a combination of "both 'tops down' and 'bottoms up'" reform, which involves simultaneously raising the lowest tariffs. He notes that the latter is "more in keeping with the image of the concertina!"

Most authors have followed Corden in applying the term only to 'Tops down' reform, probably because it can be shown to be unambiguously welfare improving if all goods are net substitutes. The alternative, of lowering the highest tariffs and raising the lowest -- and thus reducing their variance -- has been mentioned much less frequently, such as by Falvey (1994, p. 176) and Neary (1998, p. 188). Bleaney and Fielding (1995, p. 185) actually allude to it as being preferred -- as a policy though perhaps not as a term -- by the World Bank:

    Where tariff measures are included, the World Bank has a marked preference for "concertina" tariff reductions (in which the highest rates fall but the lowest do not (and may even increase) for reasons based on the welfare effects of reduced tariff dispersion.
Consumer and Producer surplus
Both of these terms were used by Marshall (1890) and were, most likely, introduced by him. My best evidence for that is that searches in Google Scholar for both terms, and for consumers surplus and producers surplus, failed to find them at all between 1600 and 1889. After that, aside from appearing in Marshall (1890), they first appeared in 1892, about which I'll say more in a moment.

Regarding consumer surplus, Marshall used the term (actually "consumers' surplus") only twice, while using its equivalent, "consumers' rent," much more frequently (47 times). Fairly early in the book (p. 175) he described the concept, and called it "surplus pleasure":

    The excess of the price which he would be willing to pay rather than go without it, over that which he actually does pay is the economic measure of this surplus pleasure: and for reasons which will appear later on, may be called CONSUMERS' RENT.
This was accompanied by a footnote that cited "some papers printed for private circulation in 1879."

Only much later in the book did Marshall introduce the term consumers' surplus, twice as a synonym for "consumers' rent." On page 429, in regard a figure showing supply and demand curves and areas labelled "Consumer's Rent" and "Producer's Rent," he said "Proceeding as in the case of Consumers' Surplus or Rent (Bk. III . Ch . iv. ยง 1), we may regard MQ as a thin parallelogram or as a thick straight line." Similarly on page 446 he said "We may now consider the effects which a change in the conditions of supply may exert on Consumers' Surplus or Rent."

Regarding producer surplus, Marshall used that term four times, and while he did twice say "Producers' Surplus or Rent," he never said "Producer's Rent" alone. I have not tried to understand this large difference in Marshall's treatment of the two sides of the market.

I mentioned above that the next use of consumer surplus after Marshall (1890) was in 1892. This was in a book by Patten (1892), who used consumer's surplus 11 times. He first (p. 15) mentioned "a net surplus to be enjoyed by all consumers" when an "increase of productive power ... tends to lower prices". Only later on page 74 did he first use consumer's surplus, including it in his Fig. III as the label of a triangle under a line measuring marginal utility of consuming a good. While we might interpret that line as a demand curve, it does not appear from the accompanying discussion and other figures that this was Patten's interpretation. Patten himself did not mention Marshall in this book (on p. 15 he cited Adam Smith and David Ricardo). It seems, therefore, that while he did use the term, he did not use it in the same sense that we know it today. Indeed, Marshall (1893), in a comment on a 1893 article by Patten, stated that Patten "has misconceived what I mean by the term 'Consumer's Surplus.'"

Patten himself acknowledged this three years later when, in Patten (1896) he said

    The next step was taken by Professor Marshall, and his work will compare favorably with that of any of his predecessors. He made this advance by measuring utility not directly in units of satisfaction, but indirectly in the quantity of money which persons will pay rather than to be deprived of each increment of commodity. ... [He] was able to construct a diagram which shows in a concrete way not only the total utility of the whole supply of any article but also of its total value and the consumer's surplus.

Continuum of goods
The first to model trade with a continuum of goods were Dornbusch, Fischer, and Samuelson (1977), who also used that term in their title. They cited an unpublished paper by Charles Wilson, also dated 1977, that further explored their model, but in the published version of that paper, Wilson (1980) credited them with having suggested this modification of traditional trade theory. This approach was admired but not used extensively by others until Eaton and Kortum (2002) replaced deterministic continuous functions for productivity with stochastic distributions in what is now the widely used EK Model.

Convergence play, Convergence trade
These two terms first appeared in 1993 in explaining the ERM Crisis motivated by expectations that interest rates would converge while exchange rates would not change, as intended by the convergence criteria.

In 1993, the IMF issued the multi-authored report Goldstein et al. (1993), Chapter III of which was titled "Prologue to the ERM Crisis: 'Convergence Play'". Discussing "the large, cumulative inflows of capital into the higher-yielding ERM currencies," the report goes onto say:

    One of the important factors motivating these inflows was the growing perception by international investors that the member countries of the EMS were on a continuous convergence path toward European Monetary Union (EMU), under which interest rate differentials in favor of the high-yielding ERM currencies would increasingly overestimate the actual risk of exchange rate depreciation. As one portfolio manager recalled the prevailing view, "why settle for the yield on a deutsche mark bond when you can get the higher yield on a peseta or lira bond without a compensating exchange risk?" This came to be known in major financial centers as the "convergence play."
This source evidently did not coin the term, but I find no available sources using it any earlier.

The other term, convergence trade, also appeared at this time, and the first I find is in Group of Ten (1993), Section III of which "discusses developments during 1992 in exchange markets and international capital markets, including the role of so-called convergence trades in the exchange market turbulence."

    The idea was to invest dollar funds into high yielding securities denominated in, say, lire, covering the short dollar exchange rate exposure by purchasing dollars forward against sales of marks. The mark was used as a "proxy hedge" because, as the lowest-yielding ERM currency, its forward discount against the dollar was much less than that of the lira. The investor was left with a long lira/short mark position. As long as the lira/mark exchange rate did not change significantly over the term of the investment, the investor could earn the lira-mark interest differential on top of the dollar interest return.
As in the Goldstein source, this does not appear to coin the term, but again I find no earlier sources using it.

Neither of these sources stresses the importance of convergence of interest rates that presumably played an important role, both in the phenomenon and in the naming of it. Interest rates in Europe were intended to become more similar as part of the Maastricht Criteria. If that was expected, buyers of high-yield bonds could expect those interest rates to fall and the prices of their bonds to rise, making a capital gain larger than simply the higher interest rate. Svensson (1994) explained this better than most:

    A more specific phenomenon has been labelled 'convergence trading'. Many investors exploited the interest rate differentials between the low yield deutsche mark and high yield currencies like the lira and the Swedish krona, borrowing in deutsche mark and investing in lira and krona. After the September crisis investors have reported in interviews that they did this mostly expecting further convergence and disappearance of the interest rate differentials, in which case they would make a capital gain.

In an effort to see which of these terms is used more often, I asked NGram to plot "convergence trade" and "convergence play," but the former did not find anything, for some reason. Instead, the following is the plot for "convergence trading" and "convergence play", which suggests, perhaps incorrectly, that convergence play has been the more common and lasting.

The use of both of these terms has diminished, and they have been replaced by carry trade.

Currency area
Mundell (1961, p. 657) spoke of "...defining a currency area as a domain within which exchange rates are fixed...". Perhaps because the exchange rates among separate national currencies are seldom if ever truly fixed, the term has come to mean a group of countries that share a common currency. Mundell also coined the term "optimum currency area" which is now more commonly expressed as optimal currency area.

Deadweight loss
This term for the efficiency costs of a tariff or other market imperfection was introduced to the literature by Samuelson (1952, p. 294):
    If the impediments consist of artificial tariffs whose revenues represent mere transfers of income, substitution effects are more heavily involved, the only income effects being the transfers between and within countries and the "deadweight loss" resulting from interferences with perfect competition.
My Google-Scholar search has failed to find the term before this, but Samuelson's failure to explain it further in this source suggests that he, at least, had been using the term for some time. He certainly continued to use it in subsequent writings. It appeared in four more of his publications just between 1952 and 1960. In various of these he defined deadweight somewhat further as "theoretically avoidable" and deadweight loss as "inefficiency in the use of resources."

The latter appeared in Samuelson (1960) in which he honored Harold Hotelling. Perhaps coincidentally, Hotelling (1938) is one of two sources that I came across that used "dead loss" to mean the efficiency loss due to a tax. This suggests to me that Samuelson may have introduced deadweight loss as an improvement over "dead loss," since the latter is used with other meanings in other contexts. Because of that, I've found it difficult to search for others who may have used "dead loss" with this particular economic meaning (more commonly it simply means an activity that is not successful). But I did happen across Bickerdike (1906) who used it precisely for the triangle of unrequited consumer loss due to an import tariff:

    It can be shown geometrically that the "loss" Aka comprises all the dead loss involved in the reduction of imports, including the waste of energy.
where Aka was the triangle under the demand curve over the decline in imports due to an increase in price.

Whatever may have motivated Samuelson, his use of the term certainly caught on. Whereas my search for the term prior to 1950 found nothing, and in 1951-1960 found only the several articles by Samuelson, in 1961-1970 it appeared 26 times, almost all by authors other than Samuelson and with his meaning.

There is less consensus on whether to render the term as 1) deadweight loss, 2) dead-weight loss, or 3) dead weight loss. Samuelson himself, in Samuelson (1960), used both the first and the second on the same page (p. 24). A Google-Scholar search over 1970-2016 finds more than twice as many of the first (17,600) as of the second and third combined (7,580).

Depression, The Great Depression
Mendel (2009, an intern at the History News Network, reported that the term depression was being used for an economic downturn as early as US President James Monroe in 1819, referring to what has been called the Panic of 1819 and its bank failures and currency depreciation. Monroe also used the phrase great depression in his 1820 Fourth Annual Message. Other presidents after Monroe -- including Grant, Hayes, and Coolidge -- used the terms as well, prior to Herbert Hoover, who is often credited with introducing the term in preference to the more common "panic."

Although Hoover referred to the world has experiencing "a great depression," he did not give it the name The Great Depression. That seems to have been coined by Robbins (1934).

Dirty tariffication
The first use I find of this term is in a 1992 book that I will not add to my bibliography because I'm not sure of who the authors are. It is called FAIR TRADE IN BANANAS? International trade policies in bananas and proposals to alter existing policies in line with the Single European Market from University of Exeter, December 1992. It lists as editors Professor John McInerney and the Lord Peston, and as "contributors" David Hallam and Steve McConiston. Since I find no clear use of the term after that until 1994, followed by many uses in 1995, I'm inclined to credit the author(s) of this document, whoever they are, with coining the term.

The clearest explanation of the term that they provide connects it clearly with the use of tariff rate quotas, as in my definition #2. In footnote 8 on their page 37 they explain

    Note that "pure" tariffication implies that only a tariff is used to replace existing tariff and non-tariff policies, whilst "dirty" tariffication allows for import quotas associated with one lower tariff level and a higher prohibitive tariff set for excess-quota supplies -- the result being an "average" tariffication level.
Diversification cone
Dixit and Norman (1980, p. 52) attributed this to Lerner (1952) and McKenzie (1955). I see nothing in Lerner to justify this. McKenzie, however, made considerable use of the concept in the form of a set of factor endowments within which factor price equalization occurs, though he did not give it a name. Since he projected factor requirements and factor endowments onto a simplex, his set appeared as a triangle, though a cone was implicit. I do not yet know who may have preceded Dixit and Norman in using this term.

Dixit-Stiglitz utility
This refers unambiguously to the model of monopolistic competition introduced by Dixit and Stiglitz (1977) and to the similar model of Spence (1976) that led this sometimes to be called Spence-Dixit-Stiglitz utility. What is less clear is exactly what is meant by either term. The term Dixit-Stiglitz utility did not appear in publication until 1987, when it then appeared more than once but with slightly varying meanings. The varying meanings have continued since then, but the commonality among them is
    U={Σinxiρ}1/ρ       0<ρ<1
with the interpretation that n, the number of products or varieties, is variable and that σ=1/(1-ρ)>1 is the elasticity of substitution among them. It is this interpretation of variable n that allows this function to display very simply a preference for variety. If xi=x, i=1,...,n, then U reduces to
    U=n(1-ρ)/ρ(nx)
so that an equal increase in n and fall in x (keeping Σx constant) increases U to the extent that ρ<1.

Dixit and Stiglitz (p. 298) started with a somewhat general form for utility, u=U(x0,V(x1,x2,x3,...)), where the range of products was left unspecified but greater than the number of products actually consumed, n. They then considered several special cases, the one usually adopted by others being a CES form for the function V: u=U(x0,{Σinxiρ}1/ρ). What was crucial and distinctive about either form was that the number of products (often called varieties) consumed, n, was variable.

Neary (2004) noted that later users of Dixit-Stiglitz utility combined three assumptions that Dixit and Stiglitz themselves mentioned but never used in combination: symmetry of V in xi, CES form for V, and Cobb-Douglas form for U. He therefore suggested that the following should be called "Dixit-Stiglitz lite":

    u = x0(1-μ)Vμ,       V={Σinxiρ}1/ρ

In fact later users have often omitted the numeraire good, x0, or replaced it with other goods. And the symmetric CES function with variable n has, by itself, come to be what is most commonly regarded as the Dixit-Stiglitz utility function, or sometimes the Dixit-Stiglitz subutility function. In that case the Dixit-Stiglitz utility function appears identical to the CES function, the only difference being the interpretation of n as variable.

The function has also been used frequently for production, with the xi as intermediate inputs, following Ethier (1982). The number of varieties was again variable and contributed to the value of the function, which in this case was output. However, Ethier made the role of n in productivity explicit with a second parameter, and his production function was:

    M = nαin(xiρ/n)}1/ρ,       0<ρ<1, α>1
If α were equal to one, this function would not increase with a rise in n and an equal fall in a common xi=x, so α>1 is what generated Ethier's international returns to scale when the xi are traded. Ethier's function reduced to the Dixit-Stiglitz form when α=1/ρ>1, whose positive benefit from variety (greater n) is then directly related to the elasticity of substitution, σ=1/(1-ρ). Although most users of Dixit-Stiglitz utility have ignored this possibility of separating the benefits of variety from the elasticity of substitution, a few authors have followed Ethier's example, notably Benassy (1996), who was in turn followed by Acemoglu, Antras, and Helpman (2007).

Dumping, Anti-dumping
The word dumping began to be used in 1903 with essentially its current meaning of an unfairly low export price. Prior to 1903 the word was seldom used in the context of international trade (based on my Google Scholar search), and then primarily in combination with another word, such as "dumping ground" or "dumping field," in speaking of disposal of surplus product.

The term came into frequent use in 1903 in several books that were published in that year, such as Ashley (1903), and especially in the speeches of Joseph Chamberlain. In a speech on tariff reform in Liverpool on October 27, 1903, he defined dumping and stressed its harm to free-trade Britain:

    What is dumping? Dumping is the placing of the surplus of a home manufacture in a foreign country without reference to its original and normal cost. Dumping takes place when the country which adopts it has a production which is larger than its own demand. Not being able to dispose of its surplus at home, it dumps it somewhere else.
Chamberlain's remarks were in the context of what came to be called the Fiscal Question of how and whether to use tariffs to counter such behavior and to provide a tariff preference to members of the British Commonwealth who were being impacted by dumping from non-members.

Although the definition of dumping is today codified in the WTO and in national anti-dumping statutes, its definition has been subject to some dispute. Viner (1923) examined several alternative definitions and concluded in favor of "price discrimination between national markets" (p. 3). This deliberately included selling for different prices in different foreign markets and selling at home for a lower price than abroad. He called the latter practice "reverse dumping," and then had to identify the more common opposite practice as "export dumping." Finger (1993), who has argued that any industry can secure anti-dumping duties if there is political will, prefered to define dumping as "whatever you can get the government to act against under the antidumping law" (p. vii).

The first anti-dumping law was enacted in Canada in 1904, as part of amendments to the Customs Tariff Act of 1897, according to Ciuriak (2005). As reported there, the legislation made no use of the words dumping or anti-dumping. and merely provided that imports should be subject to a "special duty of customs equal to the difference between such fair market value and such selling price."

The first use that I've found of anti-dumping was Shortt (1906), writing about the Canadian policy. That the term caught on may not be surprising, but note that the other WTO-permitted unfair trade policy, directed at subsidized exports, is called a countervailing duty, not an anti-subsidy duty.

DUP activity
Bhagwati (1982) introduced this acronym for directly unproductive profit-seeking activity. After listing a variety of activities that fit this description, including rent seeking, revenue seeking, and others, he said (p. 990), "Thus, these are aptly christened DUP activities."

Dutch disease
Term was coined by The Economist in an article "The Dutch Disease" in the issue of November 26, 1977, pp. 82-83, which included the passage "... in the words of Lord Kahn [1905-1989], 'when the flow of North Sea oil and gas begins to diminish, about the turn of the [21st] century, our island will become desolate.' Any disease which threatens that kind of apocalypse deserves close attention." The article attributed the problems of the Dutch economy (an external appearance of strength but internally high unemployment and a declining manufacturing sector) to "three causes, only one of them external." These are (1) a strong currency; (2) high industrial costs; and (3) use of government gas revenues to increase spending rather than investment. As used since, the term has been focused primarily on the real exchange rate. The term was used by Corden and Neary (1982), whose reference to it as "... sometimes referred to as the 'Dutch Disease'" suggested that it had passed into common usage.

Economic weapon, the
Mulder (2022) said as he discussed the UK's Advisory Committee on Trading and Blockade in Time of War, "Its Legal Subcommittee included Cecil Hurst, the Foreign Office legal adviser who was probably the first to use the term 'the economic weapon' in 1912." Since Mulder wrote the book on the topic, he's likely correct, and I find nothing to indicate otherwise.

Google Scholar finds only two occurrences of the economic weapon prior to 1912, and these were both in the context of industrial-labor relations, where the term refered to economic actions such as strikes that workers might use against their employers. The first occurrence I find of the term meaning an economic substitute for military action against other countries was Adams (1915, p. 219):

    The economic boycott is a powerful weapon in the modern commercial and industrial world, and it should be a duty of those who are parties to international agreements to use this weapon against the transgressor and to inflict economic ostracism until expiation has been made. But the economic weapon, powerful as it is, and sufficient as it may be in many cases, is not always an adequate sanction. More direct methods are then necessary and recourse must be had to armed intervention by force.
Not surprisingly given the importance of these policies in and then subsequent to World War I, NGram shows the term peaking in 1920 but being used frequently thereafter:

Edgeworth-Bowley box
The origins of this were examined by Tarascio (1972). The diagram was first drawn by Pareto (1906), based originally, though only very partially, on a diagram of Edgeworth (1881). Edgeworth's diagram was not a box at all, and was drawn on axes more approptiate to an offer curve than to exchange of fixed quantities of goods or factors. Edgeworth's purpose was to define and depict the contract curve, which today we almost always draw within the box diagram.

Bowley's name was added to the name of the diagram as a result of Bowley (1924), who drew indifference curves for two individuals, one rotated clockwise 90 degrees and the other counterclockwise, thus forming the outline of a box, within which he showed Edgeworth's contract curve. That is probably why his name came to be associated with Edgeworth's. However, Bowley did not claim originality, and while he cited Edgeworth for the contract curve, he neither named nor attributed the box diagram. Indeed, in his own diagram showing exchange, his focus was on the internal portion and he did not extend the axes of his two indifference maps far enough to touch or cross, and therefore did not actually produce a box. Had he done so, his box would have been a mirror image of the one we normally draw today.

It was Pareto (1906), writing in Italian that was soon translated into French, who had actually been the first to draw and use the box diagram. It is unclear whether his contribution was known to Bowley and to others writing in English until later. His diagram, displaying indifference curves for two consumers, one drawn conventionally and one rotated 180 degrees, formed the box very much as we know it today, for exchange between consumers. With each consumer endowed with only one of the two goods, he showed a trade equilibrium as a common tangent to two indifference curves that were also tangent to a price line from the consumers' endowment point.

I have searched in Google Scholar for "Edgeworth box," "Edgeworth-Bowley box," "box diagram," and the joint appearance of "Edgeworth" and "box." The last of these gets many hits, of course, but none of them were about the Edgeworth box, until Stolper and Samuelson (1941). Their Figure 2, p. 67, had labor and capital on the axes and isoquants for two industries inside. Of this they said:

    This is done in Fig. 2 which consists of a modified box diagram long utilised by Edgeworth and Bowley in the study of consumers' behaviour.
Since this classic paper did not find its way into publication immediately (see Deardorff and Stern (1994)), it seems very likely that Saumuelson introduced his version and name of the box to his colleagues and students in the years before this. Whether he himself originated it or picked it up from others as an oral tradition, I do not know.

Based on all of this, it appears that the box applied to consumption, as well as the Edgeworth production box, have both often been called just the Edgeworth Box, even though Edgeworth never drew either. Calling it the Edgeworth-Bowley box is only slightly less erroneous, since Bowley's version of the box was incomplete and perhaps accidental.

Pareto was more deserving of having his name on the consumption version of the box diagram than either Edgeworth or Bowley. Stolper and Samuelson, if they needed further recognition, should share credit for the application to production that has played such a large role in international trade theory. And it seems likely that they, too, were the ones who led us to call it the Edgeworth or Edgeworth-Bowley box ever since.

Emerging market
According to The Economist (October 7, 2017), "The term was coined by Antoine van Agtmael in 1981 when he was working for the International Finance Corporation (IFC), a division of the World Bank." As explained there, he pitched the idea of a "Third World Equity Fund" -- which would give foreign investors easier access to stock markets in places like Brazil, India, and South Korea -- to a group of fund managers. Some were intrigued, but hated the name. "So Mr Agtmael spent the weekend dreaming up the term ''emerging markets', with which he hoped to evoke 'progress, uplift and dynamism.' That label proved wildly successful."

Flying Geese
The name Flying Geese Model or Paradigm derived from a graph of Akamatsu (1961), (but 1937 in Japanese) that resembled a formation of flying geese. The graph showed paths over time of a developing country's imports, production, and exports of a product, similar to the product cycle.

Fragmentation
As used to mean a splitting up of production processes, the term fragmentation was first introduced by Jones and Kierzkowski (1990), who started their analysis by noting (p. 31) that increasing returns and specialization encourage a growing firm to "switch to a production process with fragmented production blocks connected by service links.... Such fragmentation spills over to international markets." [Italics in original.] Many other terms have been used with the same, or related, meanings, as listed here, but fragmentation seemed to have caught on most widely in the 1990s academic literature. More recently, a more common choice seems to be global value chain, or just supply chain, even though these seem to connote a more linear succession of inputs-to-inputs-to-inputs, rather than a splitting up into multiple inputs at the same stage of production.

Gravity model
What we now call the gravity model of bilateral international trade flows first appeared independently in Tinbergen (1962) and Pöyhönen (1963), but neither used the word gravity. Tinbergen's formulation was very similar to the formulation of the basic model used today:
    Eij = α0Yiα1Yjα2Dijα3
where Eij is exports from country i to country j, Yi,Yj are their national incomes, Dij is the distance between them, and α0...3 are constants. Pöyhönen's formulation differed from this slightly, including country-specific multipliers cicj and replacing Dij with (1+γDij).

Pöyhönen was member of the same Finnish research team as Pulliainen (1963) whose formulation was more like Tinbergen's. While he also did not call this a gravity model, he did mention the parallel: "The results of our empirical study show that the structure of international trade is capable of description in terms of gravitational theory." (p. 88).

This analogy to gravity was actually resisted by another early user of the model, Linnemann (1966), on the grounds that force of actual gravity falls with the square of the distance between objects. He followed the above authors in setting out an equation much like the above, with Y's replaced by "potential supply" and "potential demand" which he went on to explain in terms of both GDP and population. But in his footnote 43 (pp. 34-35) he remarked, "Some authors emphasize the analogy with the gravitation law in physics, and try to establish that [α3=−2]. We fail to see any justification for this." And in the rest of his book the only mention of gravity regards the "centres of gravity" of the countries considered, used for defining distance between them.

The first to call this a gravity model seems to have been Waelbroeck (1965), which included (p. 499) "Hypothesis 2: The gravity model: distance, export push, and import pull" and has the equations from the other three authors. Waelbroeck notes that "There is, as has been pointed out, an odd similarity between formulae (6) and (7) and the law of gravity, with Yi and Yj playing the role of masses, and this justifies christening the model as the gravity, or G, model." He did not say where it was "pointed out," but it seems likely that he was referring to Pulliainen (1963).

Predating all of this explicit application to bilateral trade between countries, however, the term gravity model was used in other social science contexts, and models of this form were used, under other names, in other applications. Bramhall and Isard (1960), in a chapter of a volume on regional science, discussed "gravity, potential, and spacial interaction models -- which for short we shall term gravity models." Similar to other earlier applications that do not seem to have used that name, they formulated the number of trips between areas with different populations, using populations instead of GDPs.

Another later source, Glejser and Dramais (1969), cited gravity models as having been used for a long time in literatures on migration, tourism, and telephone calls as well as trade. In a series of papers starting with Zipf (1946), Zipf applied what he called "The P1P2/D Hypothesis" to inter-city movements of freight, persons, information, and perhaps more. Stewart (1947) included in his "Empirical Mathematical Rules Concerning the Distribution and Equilibrium of Population" a formula similar to gravity, but called it "potential." He also cited a much earlier author, Reilly (1929), who provided a "law of retail gravitation," but that was for explaining the market regions covered by cities of different sizes, not the transactions between them.

Great Moderation
This term, as applied to the moderating of economic fluctuations from the 1980s to 2007, seems first to have been used by Stock and Watson (2003). They used the word "moderation," not capitalized and without the adjective "great," throughout the paper, but the title of their section 3, p. 170, was "Dating the Great Moderation."

The term was picked up, and probably made much more visible, by Ben Bernanke in his Remarks at the meetings of the Eastern Economic Association in Washington, DC, February 20, 2004, when he was a member (but not yet Chair) of the Board of Governors of the Fed. See Bernanke (2004). He cited several authors as having documented the decline in volatility, the first being Kim and Nelson (1999) who cite McConnell and Perez-Quiros (2000), in a 1999 Fed working paper, as having documented the decline in a linear formulation rather than a structural shift. McConnell and Perez-Quiros, in turn, started their paper with "The business press is currently sprinkled with references to the 'death' or 'taming' of the business cycle in the United States." Neither of these papers used the term Great Moderation, or even the word moderation.

So it appears that the phenomenon represented by the Great Moderation was noted gradually over time and then documented by a number of scholars. The name for it as well as one of the more rigorous documentations of it were by Stock and Watson (2003).

Grexit
This term first appeared in print in Buiter and Rahbari (2012). DeTraci Regula, in an undated posting on About.com, suggested that the term was coined by the second author, Citigroup's Ebrahim Rahbari. She also pointed out the prior existence of GrexIt.com, an e-mail storage and organizing tool. I was told by someone who worked in the EU prior to 2012 that the term was in use there as early as 2010.

Harberger triangle
As a theoretical construction for measuring welfare costs due to market distortions, this idea goes back to Dupuit (1844) and independently to Jenkin (1871-72). Dupuit, pp. 280-282 in the 1969 reprint, very clearly explained how to infer utility from the area to the left of his demand curve (which has price on the horizontal axis), then used that to derive the triangle of net loss from a tax in his Figure 3. Jenkin, p. 113, provided a supply and demand diagram much as we would use today (albeit with the axes reversed and with curves, not straight lines) and also the incidence and welfare effects of a tax. He clearly identified what we would today call the excess burdens of the tax on suppliers and demanders, using the familiar (curvilinear) triangles: "This excess of loss is represented by the area CC"D for the sellers, and C'C"D for the buyers."

Hines (1999) provided a good review of this history. Although several others had used this tool, Arnold Harberger made repeated use of it especially in Harberger (1954) applied to monopolies, in Harberger (1964a) applied to an excise tax, and in Harberger (1964b) applied to other distortions.

Although Chase (1964) referred twice to "Harberger's triangle," he did so in an edited volume where he was summarizing another of Harberger's papers that appeared there. The term Harberger triagle then did not appear in print, that I can find, until 1976, even though several authors cited Harberger's papers and his method. Then, in 1976, Bruno and Habib (1976) included

    An alternative would be to use Harberger's (1964) measure based on the notion of the excess burden. If, in fact, in the above model we were to measure the area of the 'Harberger triangle' (ΔS) under the supply curve between L1 and L0, we would get ....
In the same year, Ippolito (1976) began his discussion with
    It is commonly alleged that the welfare costs of monopoly are the "Harberger triangles" generated by price-cost ratios that exceed unity [1, 2, 4, 5, 8, 10], but this approach has been recently challenged by Tullock [9].
Both authors' use of quotation marks on the term suggests that it was not yet commonly used. One might have thought that some of the seven references cited by Ippolito would have used the term, but that was not the case. I therefore date the term to 1976.

Harberger triangles in trade
Harberger himself first used his triangles to measure the costs of monopoly, and later for taxes and other market distortions. He did not apply it to tariffs or other distortions of international trade. The first I have found to do that was Johnson (1958, p. 252). Without citing any prior authors at all, so I cannot tell whether he thought this was new, he used data on trade and tariffs to calculate the benefits to the UK of moving to free trade with Europe:

    It will be approximately equal to the change in the value of imports from the Free Trade Area, multiplied by half the tariff rate previously levied. ... This is motivated in the usual way from change in consumer surplus and tariff revenue.
Johnson did not, of course, call this a Harberger triangle. Even after 1976 when the term became common as applied to domestic distortions, it was not applied to the costs of trade barriers until around 1990. Tullock (1989, p. 26) noted a "Harberger triangle" in his diagram for a trade restriction. Williamson (1990) used it to quantify the losses due to Britain's corn laws and remarked (p. 138) "Like most Harberger Triangle calculations, this figure is very small...." Around the same time, Vousden (1991) made extensive use of the tool in his treatment of protection, with "Harberger triangle" appearing in his index in five places throughout the book. I have found increasing use of the term since then in applications to tariffs and other trade barriers.

For some reason, however, trade economists have tended to prefer the term deadweight loss to identify the costs measured by Harberger triangles in the tariff context.

Hirschman index
This index of trade concentration first appeared in Hirschman (1945). Michaely (1958) misunderstood it as being identical to the Gini coefficient and called it that in his application to exports, while acknowledging that Hirschman had also used it for that purpose. In fact Hirschman's formula, H=sqrt[Σ(xi/x)2], is not the same as the Gini coefficient. As Hirschman (1964) pointed out, his formula reflects not just unequal distribution but also fewness, its value rising the smaller is the number of goods in the summation. I have calculated both measures in a spreadsheet and can confirm that they do indeed yield different values and that the Hirschman index does indeed fall as the number of goods rises, while the Gini coefficient does not. In spite of this, several others followed Michaely in calling it the Gini coefficient or Gini index, until Hirschman published his correction in 1964.

Hirschman (1964) also pointed out that his index differed from what had come to be called the Herfindahl index of industrial concentration only by Hirschman's inclusion of the square root. Herfindahl had introduced his index in Herfindahl (1950). In spite of the fact that Herfindahl himself acknowledged Hirschman's prior contribution, his index was named the Herfindahl Index by Rosenbluth (1955) and the name stuck, even though Rosenbluth later tried to correct the error. Today (June 2022), the Herfindahl index is said by Wikipedia to be "also known as Herfindahl-Hirschman index, and there is no entry at all for Hirschman index." Interestingly, NGram finds Hirschman index used most frequently since 1983, with Herfindahl used most frequently prior to that. Use of Herfindahl-Hirschman index parallels Hirschman index, but somewhat below it. I suspect that NGram includes Hirschman in its findings for Herfindahl-Hirschman. If so then it is clearly Herfindahl-Hirschman that has been most widely used since 1983.

As for the Hirschman index itself and its use for quantifying concentration of trade, it is difficult to search for it in Google Scholar without the Herfindahl, but I was able to find a few sources that used it. For example, Ng (2002), p. 587 said "The related measure used by UNCTAD is the concentration index, or Hirschman index (H)" and then provided the formula above.

Holy Trinity, Inconsistent Trinity, Impossible Trinity, and Trilemma
These four terms -- and probably more that I haven't seen yet -- have each been used in the literature of international finance to mean the impossibility, or at least the difficulty, of achieving the following three aims simultaneously:
  • exchange rate stability
  • monetary independence
  • perfect capital mobility

The first to be used for something like this was trilemma, which I only learned about belately. Maury Obstfeld directed me to a passage in Irwin (2012), who had been alerted by Russell Boyer to an early draft of Friedman (1953). It, in a passage not included in the published version, said that the macroeconomic dilemma

    has become a trilemma: fixed exchange rates, stable internal prices, unrestricted multilateral trade; of this trio, any pair is attainable; all three are not simultaneously attainable.
While Friedman's threesome was not quite the same as today's trilemma, the economics of it are similar. The term itself then disappeared from view for several decades, to re-emerge later as perhaps the most frequent of the four.

The term holy trinity was used with this meaning, but perhaps only once, as it mostly had other meanings even within international macroeconomics. The second, inconsistent trinity, appears to have been the first to be used more than once in published work, in response to the monetary crisis of 1971. The third, impossible trinity, and especially the fourth, trilemma, have been used with this meaning a great deal in recent years. I will deal with each in turn.

Holy Trinity
There are two threesomes within the literature of international finance that have sometimes been referred to by the term Holy Trinity. One threesome concerns the attributes that are needed for a stable international financial system:

    Attributes:
    • Adjustment
    • Liquidity
    • Confidence

The second threesome concerns the policy arrangements that may be used to achieve one or more of these attributes:

    Policies:
    • Exchange-rate stability
    • Monetary independence
    • Perfect capital mobility

The earliest use that I have found for Holy Trinity in the context of international monetary economics was a doctoral thesis, Høiberg-Nielsen (1983). This included (p. 116-117),

    The aim of the present chapter is then to analyze, somewhat critically, the concepts of adjustment and liquidity in an international monetary system. These two concepts [adjustment and liquidity] were together with confidence, what we might call "the holy trinity" in the debate in the late 60's on international monetary reform.
Høiberg-Nielsen thus used Holy Trinity for the threesome of attributes, which may be related to, but is surely not the same as, the threesome of policies. It seems a bit unlikely that a term coined in a doctoral thesis would have gained wider acceptance, but I have so far been unable to find it in any earlier writings.

The term Holy Trinity is of course widely used in a religious context, and also in many other contexts where a threesome is thought to be especially important. In economics, for example, Machlup (1965) and at least one other used it for the "objectives of a stable price level, full employment, and a faster growth rate." My search for the term in Google Scholar is hindered by its wide use in other contexts. But I have looked for it, as well as the other terms considered here, in some of the more widely cited works of both Mundell and Fleming, and I failed to find it.

My expectation that I would find it in Mundell was prompted by Rose (1994) who said (p. 1) "This paper is concerned with the compatibility of: fixed exchange rates; independent monetary policies; and perfect capital mobility, Mundell's 'Holy Trinity'." Note though that Rose uses Holy Trinity for the problematic threesome of policies, not the threesome of attributes. I have yet to find any earlier source for this interpretation.

On the contrary, I found Eichengreen (1993, p. 621) saying, "In the 1960s and 1970s, most of the literature on the Bretton Woods system was organized around the holy trinity of adjustment, liquidity, and confidence." One might have expected Rose and Eichengreen to agree on the use of the term, since they were both at Berkeley, but apparently they did not. Eichengreen cited Mundell (1969), which did include a section headed "Liquidity, Adjustment, and Confidence," but Mundell did not mention any trinity, at least in that source.

Inconsistent Trinity
The earliest use of any trinity to refer to the threesome of policies was Wallich (1972). In a section headed Inconsistent Trinity, he wrote (pp. 6-7):

    This sequence of events dramatically illustrates a fact well known to economists but never recognized in our institutional arrangements or avowed principles of national policy: fixed exchange rates, free capital movements, and independent national monetary policies are inconsistent. In certain situations, such as those of 1969-1971, one of the three has to give. A country can have any two of the trinity.

Given his prominence -- Wallich had been a member of the US President's Council of Economic Advisors and was later a governor of the Federal Research Board -- I'm not surprised that his use of the word trinity for this threesome led others to use it, even if some may have also called the trinity "holy."

Impossible Trinity
The origin of Impossible Trinity is easier to find, if not necessarily its meaning. Reisen (1993) published "The Impossible Trinity in South-East Asia," in International Economic Insights. Unfortunately, I have been unable to access the paper itself, and therefore I cannot say with certainty how he used the term. What I do have is the comment by Rose (1994, p. 26): "Reisen (1993) believes that the Holy Trinity (which he refers to as the Impossible Trinity) has been possible in South-East Asia." Assuming that Rose's interpretation of Holy Trinity was also Reisen's interpretation of Impossible Trinity, we have the latter as clearly meaning the trio of policies.

That the Impossible Trinity was the policy threesome was confirmed by Frankel (1994), who cited Reisen, and also by Borensztein and Ostry (1994) who did not. So at least until I can confirm from the source that Reisen used the term for the policy threesome, I am comfortable attributing it to him for its current use. Since his own publication seems to be a bit obscure, I am inclined to credit others, such as Rose and Frankel, for the term's subsequent popularity.

Trilemma
It seems that the most common term in today's literature for the difficulty of the threesome of policies is trilemma. That word has meaning in standard English for any three objectives that are difficult to achieve together because any two preclude the third. And the word has been used a great deal in contexts other than international finance, making it -- again -- hard to identify its first use in international finance for the policy threesome considered here.

My own search failed to find it before 1997, but again Maury Obstfeld alerted me to his paper Obstfeld (2020) where he cited columns by Friedman both in Newsweek, Friedman (1979), and in The Economist, Friedman (1983), that used the term. It was unclear in the first of these that this was the same trilemma discussed here, but in the second it was very clear indeed:

    ...forced those of us who have written on this subject more recently to expand Keynes's dilemma to a trilemma. A country is compelled to choose two of the following three desirable objectives: stable prices (or, more generally, an independent monetary policy), a stable exchange rate (or, more generally, a predetermined path of exchange rates), freedom from exchange controls.

I found trilemma first in scholarly published work with its clear current meaning by Obstfeld and Taylor (1997). They said (p. 2):

    Secular movements in the scope for international lending and borrowing may be understood, we shall argue, in terms of a fundamental macroeconomic policy trilemma that all national policymakers face: the chosen macroeconomic policy regime can include at most two elements of the inconsistent trinity of (i) full freedom of cross-border capital movements, (ii) a fixed exchange rate, and (iii) an independent monetary policy oriented toward domestic objectives. [Italics in original.]
Their wording and italics, together with the absence of any citation to someone else, suggest to me that they thought they were introducing the term (though as noted above, Obstfeld later learned of its use by Friedman). Combined with my own failure to find any prior use of the term with this meaning, I credit Obstfeld and Taylor for its modern use, at least in scholarly writing.

To sum up, based on the sources that I have learned of, the four terms were introduced into the scholarly literature of international finance, with the current meaning of the threesome of policies above, by the following:

Inconsistent Trinity: Wallich (1972)
Holy Trinity: Høiberg-Nielsen (1983)
Impossible Trinity: Reisen (1993)
Trilemma: Friedman (1983)
Obstfeld & Taylor (1997).

Home market effect
This effect was both introduced and named by Krugman (1980), so there is not much more to say. However, Krugman spoke on p. 955 of "'Home Market' Effects," plural, suggesting that there may be more than one. The two effects that he demonstrated were the following:

First, in a model with increasing returns to scale (IRS), p. 957;

    This gives us our first result on the effect of the home market. It says that if the two countries have sufficiently dissimilar tastes each will specialize in the industry for which it has the larger home market.
Then, under "very special assumptions and on the analysis of special cases," p. 958:
    Nonetheless, the analysis does seem to confirm the idea that, in the presence of increasing returns, countries will tend to export the goods for which they have large domestic markets.
These, to me, seem to be two sides of the same coin, predicting across countries which will export in an IRS industry, and across industries, which a given country will export.

It is worth noting also, as Krugman did in his final sentence, that these results were anticipated by Linder (1961) and by Grubel (1970).

Linder did stress the importance of the demand in the home market in order for a country's industry to succeed and export (p. 17): "...a country cannot achieve a comparative advantage in the production of a good which is not demanded on the home market." But rather than stressing IRS, he viewed production functions as differing across countries in response to differences in demand (p. 90): "... the production functions of goods demanded at home are the relatively most advantageous ones." And Linder never spoke of a home market effect.

Grubel, in a larger discussion of intra-industry trade, considered products differentiated by quality, with low-quality goods demanded more by low income consumers. Allowing then for IRS as well as differences in the distribution of income across countries, he noted that a country with a preponderance of low-income consumers would "specialize in the production of the low price and low quality model, supplying its own population and exporting to meet the demands of [the other country's] population with below average income."

Hub and spoke integration
Once countries began to enter free trade agreements with multiple other countries that did not have FTAs among themselves, it may have been inevitable that this arrangement would come to be called hub-and-spoke integration. The first use of hub-and-spoke in this context that I have identified was Wonnacott (1990), which included it in the title. The paper itself is no longer available, at least that I can find. I therefore don't know whether Wonnacott merely used the term to describe these arrangements, or went beyond that to formulate an economic model of this sort of integration.

Such a model was certainly provided by Puga and Venables (1995) who also included hub-and-spoke integration as a keyword for their paper. They also cited Baldwin (1994) as discussing such arrangements, although again, as I have so far been unable to access Balwin's book, I don't know whether he even used the term or provided a model. Baldwin was cited by one author, Stawarska (1998), as "the author of the hub and spoke integration model."

Ideal price index
There are two widely used things that are routinely given the name ideal price index. The oldest is the square root of the product of the Paasche and Laspeyre price indexes:

where p0, q0 and p1, q1 are vectors of prices and quantities of multiple goods at times (or locations, etc.) 0 and 1 respectively. Index provides a measure of an average change in prices between situations 0 and 1 that, by lying between Paasche and Laspeyre, seeks to avoid their downward and upward biases, respectively.

The second item that has come to be called an ideal price index is what can be derived from an explicit utility or production function as the minimum cost, given the set of individual prices of goods or inputs, of a unit of utility or output. The specific formula therefore depends on the utility or production function chosen, but most commonly in recent years these have been assumed to be CES, often with a variable number of arguments as in the Dixit-Stiglitz function.

The arguments of this function can be countable, but most often today they are taken to be in an uncountable set, over which both objective function and ideal price index are integrals. For example, using the notation of Bergstrand et al. (2019), let utility in situation i (year, country, etc.) be

where qi(ν) is the quantity demanded in situation i of variety ν, Ωi is the set of varieties available for consumption in situation i, and σ >1 is the (constant) elasticity of substitution between varieties. Then the ideal price index for prices pi(ν) in situation i is
This is particularly convenient, as the same analysis implies the following demands for the goods:
where Ei is total expenditure. Thus, the quantity demanded of variety ν depends inversely on its price relative to expenditure and also inversely (since σ >1) on its price relative to Pricei.

The term ideal price index has been used for objective functions ranging from Cobb-Douglas, through 2-good and n-good CES, to functions like this with additional arguments for other categories of goods. So unlike Index above, there is no single agreed-upon formula for this version of the ideal price index.

Interestingly, this second version, despite its name, is not really an "index" at all in the usual sense. Indexes are needed when a simple average would not be meaningful, as when averaging across items with different units of measurement. Thus the initial Index above in necessarily a ratio, comparing prices across two situations. Neither numerators nor denominators within the expression have any meaning by themselves, but only in relation to their counterparts. In contrast, Pricei is defined for just the single situation i. If the objective function is a production function, then it is the minimum cost of a unit of output, which is well understood. But if it is a utility function, then it is the cost of a unit of utility, which has never been intended to have meaning by itself.

Therefore, what is today routinely called an ideal price index only becomes an actual price index when used in a ratio, such as (Pricei / Pricej), comparing prices in two different situations. It should be noted, too, that even this ratio will only be meaningful if the utility or production functions from which Pricei and Pricej are derived are linearly homogeneous and therefore, for utility, homothetic.

Now where did all this come from? For the older Index, that is fairly easy. It was Fisher (1922) who suggested and named it, though the formula itself had been suggested much earlier by Bowley (1899). Bowley called it (p. 641) "The best method theoretically for measuring 'aisance relative'." Aisance in French apparently means ease or affluence. For decades after Fisher named it, the square-root formula has been used and usually referred to as the "Fisher ideal price index."

The first effort I have seen to try to do better than Fisher by deriving a measure of prices from an objective function was Samuelson and Swamy (1974). They continued to use the term ideal price index but only for Fisher's formula, not for their own. To improve on this, they defined by a price index and a quantity index from general objective functions, and showed them to be dual to one another.

Samuelson and Swamy do not call their own indexes "ideal." Recognizing instead their dependence on scale or income, they say (p. 568)

    We cannot hope for one ideal formula for the index number: if it works for the tastes of Jack Spratt, it won't work for his wife's tastes.
Their "quantity index" is, for consumers, really a utility function, and the duality with the price index captures exactly what was indicated above, that it is a minimum cost function. Rather than call it "ideal," they use several other terms for their price index (which as already noted is not really an index, a fact that they note), including "exact," "invariant canonical," and "true."

Most often cited by those who use things like Pricei above are Sato (1976) and Vartia (1976), whose Sato-Vartia weights allow them to give appropriate weights to different prices. Both Sato and Vartia did call their indexes "ideal," but as "ideal log-change index numbers" and, in the case of Sato, an "ideal log-change price index." Neither spoke of an ideal price index without the "log-change" qualification. Vartia referenced a 1975 discussion paper by Diewert that also deals with "ideal log-change index numbers." Diewert (1978) later examined several alternative price indexes, including what he called the Vartia index, but he used the word "ideal" only for the Fisher index. And in later work he showed that the Fisher index would be what he called "exact," for a unit cost function that is quadratic. His "exact" seems to be what is now called "ideal," in that it can be derived from a specified objective function.

Considering the role of the Pricei form of the ideal price index in measuring the importance of variety for welfare, one might have expected it to have been derived by Dixit and Stiglitz (1977). They did indeed derive it (for a sum of varieties, not an integral), and they called it a "price index," but they did not call it "ideal."

It is only in 1985 that I find sources using the term ideal price index with the meaning of Pricei. Both Obstfeld (1985) and Jagannathan (1985) used the term and attributed the idea to Samuelson and Swamy (1974), even though neither those authors -- nor any since that I can find -- had used the term in print. From the published record, I cannot infer who among all these authors and others may have begun using the term in conversation.

The term has certainly caught on in recent years, but interestingly it was not used in two of the most influential papers that used the concept itself. Feenstra (1994) and Broda and Weinstein (2006) -- both known for using it to quantify the benefits from increased variety due to international trade -- used the index but not its name. Feenstra (p. 158) spoke of an "exact price index for the CES unit-cost function." Broda and Weinstein followed Feenstra in calling it the "exact price index," and used ideal price index only for the Fisher formula.

Well before Broda and Weinstein (2006), however, I find numerous uses of ideal price index to mean something like Pricei, and I find even a few before Feenstra (1994) such as Obstfeld (1985) and Jagannathan (1985) mentioned above. By now the term seems to have become far too standard for most authors to mention any source or sometimes even to explain it. As just one example, I went through the 37 appearances of ideal price index found by Google Scholar for the year 2003, and eleven of them were a variant of Pricei. I have not done the same for very recent years, as the term is now used more than 100 times each year, still often with the qualification "Fisher," but also often without and presumably something like Pricei.

Immiserizing growth
The term "immiserizing growth" was used by Bhagwati (1958) and it seems unlikely that anyone used it before him, since he seems to have coined the word "immiserizing."

As for the concept, Bhagwati credited Johnson (1953, 1955) with identifying a form of immiserizing growth and also with working out the conditions for Bhagwati's form of it in an unpublished note. Long before both of them, Edgeworth (1894, p. 39-40) had shown, though only by example, that increased production of exports could so reduce their relative price that the country would lose or, as Edgeworth put it, be "damnified by the improvement." Perhaps he should have called it "damnifying growth."

Edgeworth in turn credited Mill (1821) with noting the possible worsening of the terms of trade, although Mill apparently incorrectly equated this worsening with a necessary decline in welfare. (I have not read Mill and am taking Edgeworth's word for this.)

Infant industry protection
Several sources cite Alexander Hamilton (1791) as the first to argue in favor of tariffs to protect infant industries, on the grounds that their costs are initially so high that they will only be able to compete if protected, and that they will then be able to reduce their costs sufficiently to prosper without assistance. Hamilton's purpose was indeed to argue both for the importance of manufactures and for the need to use policy to promote manufactures. However, in parts of this document he stated a clear preference for using "bounties" -- i.e., subsidies -- for this purpose: "...they are, in some cases particularly in the infancy of new enterprises, indispensable." (p. 280) Elsewhere, speaking specifically of encouraging production of iron, he favored a tariff: "The only further encouragement of manufactories of this article ... seems to be an increase of the duties on foreign rival commodities."

Some have also cited Say (1803) as an early advocate of infant industry protection. I have searched that document and do not find the basis for this. There is a discussion of reasons for using tariffs (mostly called "duties"), but none seems to capture the infant industry reasoning.

Most cite List (1841), writing in German, as providing the first explicit case for infant industry protection, and this seems right. In Chapter 12 of the 1909 translation by Sampson S. Lloyd, he said:

    It is true that protective duties at first increase the price of manufactured goods; but it is just as true, and moreover acknowledged by the prevailing economical school, that in the course of time, by the nation being enabled to build up a completely developed manufacturing power of its own, those goods are produced more cheaply at home than the price at which they can be imported from foreign parts.
It may be that List was taking this argument from "the prevailing economical school," but more likely he was just applying the insights from that literature to trade policy.

It was Mill (1848) who made the case first in English:

    The superiority of one country over another in a branch of production often arises only from having begun it sooner. .... A country which has this skill and experience yet to acquire, may in other respects be better adapted to the production than those which were earlier in the field. .... But it cannot be expected that individuals should, at their own risk, or rather to their certain loss, introduce a new manufacture, and bear the burthen of carrying it on until the producers have been educated up to the level of those with whom the processes are traditional. A protecting duty, continued for a reasonable time, will sometimes be the least inconvenient mode in which the nation can tax itself for the support of such an experiment.
Mill apparently had some second thoughts about this case, as he changed "will" in the last sentence to "might" in his 7th edition. And an editor quoted him from a letter in 1869 saying
    Even on this point I continue to think my opinion was well grounded, but experience has shown that protectionism, once introduced, is in danger of perpetuating itself... and I therefore now prefer some other mode of public aid to new industries, though in itself less appropriate.
Nonetheless, Mill has continued to be the major figure cited as making the case for infant industry protection.

The term "infant industry protection"
Neither Mill nor any of the earlier authors used the term infant industry protection, but instead spoke in various ways of firms and industries that were newly established. Hamilton spoke only once of an "infant manufacture" and List only once of "infant manufactures." The earliest mention I have found of anything like infant industry protection was an anonymous piece in the October 1854 issue of The North American Review, apparently stating the views of this journal with regard to protection. On page 479 appeared the following:

    But the necessities and the requisite independence of a new people rising into greatness in a new world, inexorably demanded protection for its infant industry, and the aid of government in support of the various arts and manufactures during the period of their weakness and immaturity.
This did not specify the form of that protection, and went on to say that "the aid they sought from the government was designed to be only temporary."

I find no further occurrences of the phrase infant industry until the period 1880-1885. Taussig (1883) made the case for what he only called "young industries," but I found four other authors, around the same time, referring positively or negatively to protection of "infant industries." Sumner (1985), for example, in his Chapter V on "Sundry Fallacies of Protectionism," listed his first as "That infant industries can be nourished up to independence and that they then become productive." The idea, together with the association with infant rather than young, new, or immature industries had become the standard term. Ely (1888), in a collection of articles originally written for the Baltimore Sun, devoted a chapter to "The Infant Industry Theory of Protectionism Further Considered."

The conditions for "infant industry protection"
Also associated with infant industry protection are two "tests" to be satisfied in order for protection to be justified. These were identified and named by
Kemp (1960) as the Mill Test and the Bastable Test. Mill's test was that the protection be temporary, as Mill (1848) added in his 7th edition:

    ...protection should be confined to cases in which there is good ground of assurance that the industry which it fosters will after a time be able to dispense with it; nor should the domestic producers ever be allowed to expect that it will be continued to them beyond the time necessary for a fair trial of what they are capable of accomplishing.
Bastable's test was that the benefit from protection must exceed its cost, or as stated by Kemp, p. 65, "It is necessary, further, that the ultimate saving in costs should compensate the community for the high costs of the protected learning period." Bastable (1899, p. 135) himself stated both conditions:
    The onus of proof rests with those who advocate their employment, and they are bound to show (1) that the industry to be favoured will after a time be self-supporting, and (2) that the ultimate advantage will exceed the losses incurred during the process.

Intermestic
I could have simply said due to Manning (1977) in the glossary entry for this word, but I can't resist quoting the passage where the author coined the term:
    These new issues are thus simultaneously, profoundly and inseparably both domestic and international. If I may be permitted a coinage whose very cacophony may help provide emphasis-these issues are "intermestic."
The term seems to have caught on, as it is found over 60,000 times by Google, almost 3,000 times by Google Scholar, and a substantial number of times in Google NGrams, though the use peaked before 2000.

J-Curve
Magee (1973) seems to have been the first to do careful theoretical analysis of this phenomenon of the trade balance first worsening before it improves after a devaluation. But he was certainly not the first to use the term, as he cited a passage from the 1972 Wall Street Journal describing "what economists call a J-curve" in reference especially to the aftermath of the devaluation of the British pound in 1967.

A search through Google Scholar finds the term J-curve used frequently in other contexts, but the first use of the term applied to effects of a currency devaluation seems to have been at a 1971 conference (the proceedings of which I have not yet seen) and by Posner (1972). Both of these use the term as though it is already familiar, so I suspect that it had entered common use before this in the economic press.

Kaldor-Hicks criterion
Kaldor (1939) was the first to state this criterion, but he was followed in the next issue of the same journal by Hicks (1939) who built on Kaldor and developed the idea more fully. One could easily, based on reading Kaldor and the fact that Hicks did not claim to have had the idea himself, conclude that this should be called simply the Kaldor criterion. Several authors in the next few years did attribute it solely to Kaldor. Most notable was Scitovszky (1941), who pointed out that the "principle enunciated in Mr. Kaldor's first-quoted article" (p. 77, footnote 1) could in certain cases justify both a policy change and its reversal.

It was Little (1949a, 1949b) who first called it the Kaldor-Hicks criterion. In 1949a, he credited Hicks with going beyond Kaldor by explicitly using it as a criterion for an increase in welfare, and then, throughout the last half of the paper, called it the Kaldor-Hicks criterion. Later the same year Little (1949b) addressed Scitovszky's criticism, and used that terminology throughout.

Leontief Paradox
Leontief did not use the word "paradox" himself in his original article, Leontief (1953), nor in his follow-up Leontief (1956) (except in his reference there to Valavainis-Vail (1954), mentioned below). And it is not clear that he thought of his result as paradoxical, in the sense of contradicting established theory. Instead, and accepting the theory, he interpreted his result as telling us that the US was not as abundant in capital, relative to labor, as most would have thought. As he concluded,
    We find that, contrary to widely held opinion, our exchange of domestically produced goods for competitive imports serves as a means to compensate for the comparative shortage of our domestic capital supply and a corresponding over-supply of American labor.
He attributed that over-supply of labor to "the peculiarly high effectiveness of that labor force."

But others certainly did see it as a paradox. The first to say so that I have found in print was Ellsworth (1954, p. 282) who spoke twice of "the paradoxical conclusion of Professor Leontief's paper." Later that same year, Valavainis-Vail (1954) titled his paper "Leontief's Scarce Factor Paradox" though, oddly, he did not use "paradox" in the body of the paper, and I wonder if an editor might have suggested that because the term was already in use.

The first appearance that I've found of Leontief Paradox was in Buchanan (1955) who included it in the title, "Lines on the Leontief Paradox." Like Valavainis-Vail, he did not use the term in the body of the article, and since he cited Valavainis-Vail, he (or his editor) may have just opted for the shorter version, which may or may not have already been in regular use in discussions of the work.

The first that I've found of Leontief Paradox in publication after Valavainis-Vail was a cryptic mention that Google Scholar finds in The World Today in August, 1958:

    ... exports labour-intensive goods and imports capital-intensive goods -- Then there is the Leontief paradox. Despite the high wage structure in the United States and the existance of relatively cheap capital, America a fact quite contrary to all the preconceived rules of international trade.
Then in 1959 I find Leontief paradox being used by four different authors. Clearly, the term had become standard by then.

Lerner diagram
The Lerner Diagram was first drawn by Lerner in an unpublished seminar paper (a "term paper" according to his teacher Lionel Robbins) in 1933. He used unit-value isoquants together with unit isocost lines to show the relationship between goods prices and factor prices in the H-O model. That paper was reproduced, "as it was originally written" according to the journal editor, as Lerner (1952). It appears that Findlay and Grubert (1959) were the first to make extensive use of the diagram, attributing it as "a diagram introduced by Mr. A. P. Lerner in his brilliant paper on factor price equalization in international trade." They did not happen to christen it the Lerner Diagram, however, and the first use of this (based on a Google Scholar search) was by Findlay (1971).

Some (including myself, until I learned better) have called it the Lerner-Pearce diagram, giving credit also to Pearce (1952). Bierwag (1964), in footnote 2, p. 57, said "This diagram is often called the Lerner-Pearce diagram..." citing Lerner (1952) and the Pearce's comment in the same issue of the the journal, and said "it has been widely used in international trade theory." That may be, but he cites only Findlay and Grubert (1959) plus the preface to the Japanese edition of Harry Johnson's International Trade and Economic Growth, which I have not attempted to find.

In fact, although Pearce (1952) was debating Lerner regarding the likelihood of factor price equalization, he used unit isoquants, not unit-value isoquants, for the purpose. Since these do not align in equilibrium with a single unit isocost line, they cannot be used in the same way, and they do not achieve the essential simplicity of Lerner's construction. Pearce did use the diagram with unit-value isoquants in his comment on Lerner (1952), but there he wass clearly following Lerner.

Lerner paradox
What we came to call the Lerner paradox was a result that Lerner (1936) included in his analysis, the main point of which was not the paradox but rather the Symmetry Theorem that was featured in the article's title. The paradox is that, while we usually expect a tariff, if it affects world prices at all, to improve the tariff-levying country's terms of trade, Lerner demonstrated a possibility that it may worsen.

The paper itself seems to have been ignored for over a decade, as the first references to it that I find were in 1949, in Metzler (1949) and in Meade (1949), both seeming to draw more on Lerner's tools of analysis than on the results themselves, and with no mention that I can find of what we now call the Lerner paradox. After 1949, attention to the Lerner paper increased through and beyond the 1950s, but only for his symmetry result.

The first paper I've found that even mentions Lerner's terms of trade result was Bhagwati (1963). Looking at the effects of a tariff on both internal and external price ratios, he credited Lerner (1936) both with the Metzler paradox and the Lerner paradox, though not exactly by those names. Instead he just said that both were "paradoxical." Regarding the internal commodity price ratio, he said (pp. 17-18):

    A tariff, imposed on a free trade situation, can raise, lower or leave unchanged the internal commodity price-ratio. The 'paradoxical' possibility that a tariff may lower the internal price of the imported good is attributed to Metzler, but was analysed earlier by Lerner.
For the external commodity price-ratio he said (p. 18):
    This again can register any behaviour. A rise, however, would be 'paradoxical' and Lerner must be assigned priority for an analysis of this possibility.

After that, the first mention I find of the worsening-terms-of-trade result is in Kemp (1966), who also cited Lerner but not for that result. Oddly, Kemp got the terms of trade worsening in his model because he allowed for international capital flows, not because of Lerner's expenditure of the tariff revenue. Indeed, while Kemp listed the Lerner paper among his references, he never mentioned Lerner in the text, and it seems clear that he was unaware of the result at the time.

Subsequently, several authors explored extensions of the tariff-worsening-the-terms-of-trade result to other models, some citing Lerner (1936) and others not. Komiya (1967, p. 147) used a model with non-traded goods to find the "so-called Lerner case" which he called "a perverse situation." Gruen and Corden (1970) obtained the result in a three-good model drawing on the Rybczynski Theorem and without mentioning Lerner. Suzuki (1976) cited Lerner along with these and others as he explored the issue in detail. He never called the result a "paradox" however, but only a "perverse result," a term that he repeated many times. His only mention of "paradox" was for the Metzler result. Jones (1977) mentioned Lerner several times, but not for the terms-of-trade result, for which he only mentioned Gruen and Corden (1970), where he spoke of "the paradoxical worsening of the terms of trade."

The first uses I find for "Lerner paradox" are in 1985, almost half a century after Lerner's paper. It first appeared in Casas and Choi (1985, p. 984):

    We also show that while an increase in transport costs will necessarily improve the transport producing country's terms of trade within the framework of the Falvey model, the possibility -- analogous to the Lerner paradox in tariff theory -- that the shipping country's terms of trade might deteriorate and cause a further reduction in welfare cannot be ruled out under different assumptions.
They went on to make repeated uses of the term "Lerner-like paradox". Later that same year, Webb (1985, p. 40) qualified a result as being valid "in the absence of a Lerner paradox".

I'd be tempted to credit these authors as the first to use the term, were it not for Jones (1977) having previously called the worsening of the terms of trade "paradoxical" and also his repeated use of the term shortly after these two authors in Jones (1987). There, Jones said "Lerner paradox" fully nine times and "Lerner paradoxical" twice. Knowing how influential Ronald Jones was in the trade community, both as a teacher and as a speaker at conferences, I'm inclined to give him considerable credit not only for the term but also for his role bringing this long neglected result to our attention. But Bhagwati (1963) also deserves credit for recognizing Lerner's contributions and for calling them paradoxical.

Level playing field
This term in a general context means subjecting all participants in an activity to the same rules. Exactly how that came to be seen as leveling a field is not at all clear. In sports, a tilted playing field may well advantage one team or the other, but by changing direction at half-time, that advantage can be made even.

In the context of economics, I find the level playing field mentioned first for banking, and for financial markets more generally, as these were deregulated around 1980. As regulations were relaxed for some financial institutions, other institutions sought similar relaxation for themselves. These concerns extended especially to international financial markets, where differences in national regulations put some countries' firms at a disadvantage.

I find no use of the term level playing field in the context of international trade until 1982, when Bergsten and Cline (1982) cited Cline as noting that as comparative advantages become small due to growing similarity of factor endowments and technologies, differences in government policies and regulations become increasingly important in determining trade. They then say (p. 24):

    Under these conditions trade performance becomes less a matter of inherent comparative advantage and more one of determination by the type of strategic behavior associated with imperfectly competitive markets. A "level playing field," with international rules of behavior, becomes especially important where comparative advantage is arbitrary.
The following year, at least three more authors used the term with similar meaning. I won't quote them all here, except to note that Reich (1983), who later became Secretary of Labor under President Clinton, suggested the following (p. 788):
    Or we could simply match other nations' barriers and subsidies (and expect them to match our own) in an attempt to create a "level playing field" for free trade.

Lump of labor fallacy
The origin of this term is easily found: Schloss (1892). Schloss had used the term lump of labour in a 1891 journal article that I've been unable to access, but the 1892 book was his major contribution. In it (p. 44) he speaks of "that noteworthy fallacy to which I desire to direct attention under the name of 'the theory of the Lump of Labour.'"
    In accordance with this theory it is held that there is a certain fixed amount of work to be done, and that it is best in the interests of the workmen that each shall take care not to do too much work, in order that thus the Lump of Labour may be spread out thin over the whole body of work-people.
Schloss's purpose was to debunk the view that workers can benefit themselves and others by doing less work or doing it less efficiently. He explained this wonderfully on page 46:
    A full treatment of this subject would take us too far afield. But the character of this fallacy will best be understood, if the objection entertained to a man's doing his level best is compared with the precisely similar objection to a man's using the best available tools; in other words, with the popular objection to the use of motor power and machinery. No clear thinker believes that, in order to provide labour for the unemployed, it is advisable that we should give up steamploughs for ordinary iron ploughs, these again for wooden ploughs, and, in the ultimate resort, should abandon these instruments and scratch the ground with the fingers.
The term has been widely used with both its British and American spellings of "labo(u)r", as is evident from the following NGram plots of its use and also from its appearances in Google Scholar (592 for "labour", 438 for "labor").

However, almost all of these uses of the term were unrelated to international economics. Among the many issues for which the lump of labor fallacy has been mentioned are the effects of the following on wages and employment, which fit more into the field of labor economics:

  • Unions
  • Technology improvement
  • Retirement age
  • Work day and work week
  • Work-sharing
  • Minimum wage
  • Pensions
  • Student workers
It was not long before the lump of labor fallacy was also mentioned in the context of international economics, where it is natural to argue that many critics of imports, immigration and offshoring are falling prey tio it. The earliest example I found of such an argument was in Smith (1905, p. 406-7) whose scathing review of Barrie (1905) applied it to both trade and immigration:
    THIS book does not call for a lengthy review. It is an example of the strange conclusions to which one may be carried by clinging firmly to the "lump of labour" fallacy. Its main argument can be stated in a few words. The less work that some men perform, the more is there left for others, and the greater, therefore, is the demand for labour. ...

    Similarly, the more of our goods that are imported from abroad, the less employment will there be at home. The eight hours day, therefore, must be accompanied by protection. Aliens must, at the same time, be excluded, for the greater the amount that they produce, the smaller is the amount left to employ British labour.

The next example I find of such an argument, this one concerning only immigration, is in Fetter (1913, p. 17) speaking as President of the American Economic Association:
    Commonly labor's protest is expressed in terms of the untenable "lump of labor" theory of wages. "Every foreign workman who comes to America" is believed to take "the place of some American workman." The error in this too rigid conception of the influence of new supplies of labor need not be argued before an audience of economists.
One might have thought that reference to the lump of labor fallacy in a international context by such a distinguished economist would have prompted its use by many others. But I have now reviewed all uses of both lump of labor and lump of labour in Google Scholar, and found only a sprinkling of international uses throughout the 20th century, and only concerning immigration, not trade. The table below shows total uses of both terms through April, 2024, together with those related to the only three international uses that I found: immigration, trade, and offshoring (not necessarily by that name).

Both terms have been used significantly more in the 21st century than the 20th, but it is still true that the international uses are far fewer than others. There was a particular surge of discussions of migration using the term in the 2010's, prompted by Brexit.

In view of these findings, I had to wonder how I came to include this term in my Glossary of Terms in International Economics, since it has not caught on as much as one might have expected, especially about international trade. I suspect I may have been motivated by seeing it mentioned in Krugman (2003). He too used the term primarily for understanding US labor market policies (or the absence of them) that he objected to. But he went on to say:

    Second, lump-of-labor thinking -- and the policy paralysis it encourages -- feeds protectionism. If the public no longer believes that the economy can create new jobs, it will demand that we protect old jobs from new competitors in China and elsewhere.
While the term has not caught on hugely among trade economists since Krugman seems to have reintroduced it, I found two examples worth mentioning. Levy (2012) argued that President Obama, in his 2012 State of the Union Address, showed "strong skepticism about trade" when he
    ... embraced the "lump of labor" fallacy, in which one imagines a fixed number of jobs in the world that are simply slung back and forth across oceans.
Likewise, trade economists Hoekman and Nelson (2019) used the term to criticize what another author had described as the "Trump narrative ... about the relationship between globalization and jobs."

Marshall-Lerner condition
The condition was first stated in words by Marshall (1923) as characteristic of two offer curves that intersect in an unstable equilibrium, which he showed in his Fig. 20, p. 353 (appearing here as point E in Figs in the case Both Very Inelastic):
    For they assume the total elasticity of demand of each country to be less than unity, and on average to be less than one half, throughout a large part of its schedule. Nothing approaching this has ever occurred in the real world: it is not inconceivable, but it is absolutely impossible. [p. 354, bold italics added]
Although first published in 1923, the opening footnote to Appendix J in which it appeared explained that Marshall had done much of the work between 1869 and 1873, with "somewhat later dates" for "attempts to assign definite measures" and was privately printed and circulated in 1879. So this first statement of the Marshall-Lerner condition dates back at least that far, perhaps half a century before its formal publication.

The next appearance of the condition was twenty years later still, in Lerner (1944). The context was very different from that of Marshall, as Lerner was not looking at the market for international exchange of goods. Rather, his purpose was to determine whether a mechanism for maintaining full employment through the gold standard would be stable. The mechanism would start with a fall in the price level due to the outflow of gold associated with a negative trade balance. To be successful, that fall in price level would need to reduce the trade deficit, thus increasing aggregate demand. But then he said, "There are other circumstances that render the automatic maintenance of full employment still more precarious." His reason was that the direct effect of a fall in prices is to decrease the value of a given quantity of exports, not increase it, and this then needs to be offset by sufficient increase in export quantity and/or decrease in import quantity in order to cause net exports to rise. For this to be true, he said,

    The critical point is where the sum of the elasticity of demand for imports plus the elasticity of demand for exports is equal to unity.
This then, in words, was precisely the statement that has come down to us as the Marshall-Lerner condition. He also pointed out that a fall in the value of the currency would serve the purpose no better, as it would be subject to exactly the same result for the same reason. This latter interpretation, separated from the concern with employment, captured what is probably the most familiar statement of what the condition is about: the condition for a devaluation to improve the balance of trade.

A number of authors have chosen to name the condition after Robinson as well as Marshall and Lerner, presumably on the grounds that Robinson (1937) preceded Lerner in examining the same question of a devaluation and the balance of trade. Indeed, she did it more formally in a mathematical footnote that derived the change in the trade balance as

    k{Eq[εf(1h)/(εf+ηh)] − Ip[ηf(1−εh)/(ηf+εh)]}
where k was the percentage devaluation, Eq and Ip were the values of exports and imports, εf and ηh were the elasticities of demand and supply respectively for exports, and εh and ηf the elasticities for imports. Setting this to be greater than zero is not, of course, what we know as the Marshall-Lerner condition. It is not hard to get that condition from it, however: simply set the trade balance to zero (Eq=Ip) and take the limit as both supply elasticities (ηh and ηf) go to infinity. The above result becomes kEq(εf+εh−1), which will be positive if
    εf+εh > 1
Perhaps Robinson knew this and didn't think it worth mentioning, since the two conditions needed for its validity are quite restrictive, especially the assumption of zero trade balance which removes any need to reduce it by devaluation. In any case, in her second edition of the same work, Robinson (1947), she cited Lerner (1944) and stated the familiar result.

There is one other source that might have been expected to reach the result before Lerner (1944): Machlup (1939-40), who dealt in great detail with "The Theory of Foreign Exchanges." He applied supply-and-demand analysis to the exchange of currencies, and he noted that the supply curve for foreign exchange could be backward bending, changing some of market's comparative static implications. However, he did not mention that if both demands were sufficiently inelastic, then the equilibrium would be unstable. Therefore he did not find his way to the third familiar implication of the Marshall-Lerner condition: the stability of the market for foreign exchange.

From all of this, the name Marshall-Lerner condition seems appropriate, since both of those authors stated the condition, independently and in different contexts, and no other author seems to have done so before them.

Who gave it the name? Searching the literature around this time, I find Polak (1947) citing the condition, but only as "the well-known formula." Likewise Haberler (1949) presented the condition and included the following:

    This condition is usually expressed in terms of elasticities of demand for imports and of demand for exports. It is now often referred to as the "Lerner condition", although it has been mentioned by Marshall and formulated with even greater precision later by Mrs. Robinson.
However, the first I have found to call it the Marshall-Lerner condition was Hirschman (1949). His purpose was to show that the condition is actually incorrect for determining the effect of a devaluation on a non-zero trade balance (as was implicit in Robinson (1937)), and he concluded:
    Our results permit the following conclusions:
      (a) The "Marshall-Lerner" condition for devaluation to have a favorable effect on the trade balance (sum of the two elasticities larger than unity) holds only when imports are equal to exports.
His use of quotation marks around the term suggests he was introducing it. And indeed a search in Google Scholar for "Marshall-Lerner" in the period 1900-1950 finds Hirschman's as the only valid entry. I conclude that it was Hirschman who gave it the name that stuck.

Meade Index
Meade (1955a) did not put his calculation into the form of an index, except in an appendix, but rather suggested adding up the increases in trade and the decreases in trade separately, each weighted by tariffs, and concluding that there had been a gain from trade (in his context of formation of a customs union) if the former were larger than the latter.

In his example of the duty on Dutch and Belgian beer, Meade said (p. 66):

    What we need to do, therefore, is to take all the changes in international trade which are due directly or indirectly to the reduction in the Dutch duty on Belgian beer; value each change at its supply price in the exporting country and weight it by the ad valorem rate of duty in the importing country; add up the resulting items for all increases of trade and do the same for all decreases of trade; if the resulting sum for the increases of trade is greater than that for the decreases of trade, than [sic] there is an increase of welfare; and vice versa.

Meade's main point was that one should not look only at the product on which the tariff is being reduced, but rather at all changes in trade that will be caused, both positive and negative, by that change. Of course if tariffs on all other products were universally zero, then the contributions to his calculation for them would also be zero. Hence, this is a simple way of taking account of the second-best nature of a tariff reduction when tariffs on other products are not zero.

In his Appendix II (pp. 120-121), Meade formalized his calculation and called it "an index of the change in world welfare," which he derived as

      dU = uΣi{dxi(pici)}

where U was world utility, u was the common marginal utility, dxi was the change in trade of good i, pi was price to consumers, and ci was price (i.e., cost) to producers.

It seems to have been Vanek (1965, p. 15) who first called this the Meade Index.

Metzler paradox
This result from Metzler (1949) acquired immediate importance, because one interpretation of the Stolper Samuelson Theorem was that "protection helps the scarce factor," based on the presumption that a tariff increases the domestic relative price of the imported good. Metzler showed that the opposite might happen.

The earliest appearance that I find of "Metzler paradox" is Spraos (1965, p. 607), a review of Travis (1964):

    But this throws no discriminating light on the model since any known model would yield this result (the Metzler paradox excepted), nor does it make any assertion which can be tested short of instituting free trade and seeing what happens.

Chipman (1966) also used the term, stating the result and then noting that "Metzler's paradox has since been rediscovered by Allais (1961) [in French]."

In 1968, Batra (1958) published a Note on Metzler's result, arguing that its validity is limited, and he seemed to imply that he was coining the term Metzler paradox (p. 616):

    Since angle ROX is less than angle POX, the internal relative price of D's importables actually falls after the imposition of the tariff. That is what we call "Metzler-Paradox."
But it had clearly been in common use before that.

I therefore cannot know who may have been the first to say Metzler-Paradox, but I feel fairly sure that it was said, probably many times orally before it appeared in print in 1965. Metzler himself did not of course use the full term. But he did -- four times in his article -- say "paradoxical as it may seem" or variations of that. So he probably deserves credit for calling it a paradox, and others would naturally name it for him.

Mirror statistics
The technique of using one country's trade data to derive or check the trade data of a country with which it trades has probably been used as long as data on trade were being published and used. But the term for this, mirror statistics, is found first by Google Scholar in Brown, Marer, and Neuberger (1974), p. 300-301:
    Moreover, available data from different sources on the same variable -- "mirror statistics" -- often differ. Large relative discrepancies can be found between various series...
which they went on to explain in their data from the U.S., Europe, the USSR, and other countries of the OECD.

While the technique could be and probably is applied to data other than international trade, it is most frequently used for trade, and especially for trade with countries like the Soviet bloc and China where trade data, in the past, were unavailable or unreliable.

Most Favored Nation
The term goes back more than two centuries. The earliest use I've found with Google Scholar was from 1784, but the idea entered into international commercial treaties long before.

The term itself can be misleading, since when applied to a country it may be interpreted as favoring that country over others. In fact, the meaning is rather to not treat the country worse than others. It may have been this tendency to misinterpret that led the United States to replace the term with permanent normal trading relations in 1998, during the lead-up to granting China permanent MFN treatment in 2000.

Erler (1956) said that the practice of treating trade partners no worse than others goes back to the 15th century. Erler wrote in German, so I thank my friend Willi Kohler for providing the following:

    He argues that the first appearance of MFN was in the 15th century, when the territorial state was about to replace the city states, such as the Hanseatic League, that had so far dominated trade in northern and central Europe. The trade policy stance of these territorial states would soon be dominated by mercantilism. But this did not preclude MFN treatment.

    For instance, a treaty signed on August 17, 1417, by Henry V of England and Duke Johann of Burgundy stipulates that English captains shall be allowed to land their ships in Flemish ports "in the same way as the French, the Dutch and the Scottish captains would do." Erler explicitly (though perhaps not too convincingly) calls this an instance of MFN. [Erler (1956, p 52)]

    A further instance was the London Trade Agreement (sic! Londoner Handelsvertrag), signed on July 22, 1486 by Henry VII of England and Duke Franz of Brittany. It stipulates that English merchants, when doing business in Brittany, shall enjoy the exact same liberties/freedoms as do merchants from any other state who maintain commercial relationships with Brittany. Further, they shall be treated with the same "caution and graciousness" as these other merchants. This pretty much seems like true MFN treatment. [Erler (1956, p 53)]

A source that I found online but have been unable to learn the author of (it seems to be a chapter from a dissertation in India) says that the concept of MFN has been used since the middle ages. But its first use by more or less that name was in the Treaty of Utrecht, which was actually a group of several treaties ending the War of the Spanish Succession 1713-1715. One of those, the Treaty of Peace and Friendship, included the following passage:

    It is further agreed and concluded as a general rule, that all and singular the subjects of each kingdom shall, in all countries and places, on both sides, have and enjoy at least the same privileges, liberties, and immunities, as to all duties, impositions, or customs whatsoever, relating to persons, goods, and merchandizes; ships, freight, seamen, navigation and commerce; and shall have the like favour in all things as the subjects of France, or any other foreign nation, the most favoured, have, possess, and enjoy, or at any time hereafter may have, possess, or enjoy. Source

New new trade theory
This name, which is surely even more unfortunate than the "New Trade Theory," was introduced to the literature in 2004 by Richard Baldwin and co-authors. Baldwin and Forslid (2004) say the following (p.1):
    This empirical evidence has lead [sic] to the development of what might be called the new new trade theory, that is to say new trade models modified to allow for a more sophisticated view of firms. One branch of this theory has been particularly successful in accounting for the new empirical findings that was started by Melitz (2003); Bernard, Eaton, Jensen and Kortum (2003) also present an early model.
It may be surprising that a literature than began in 2003 should already have a name a year later. But these papers had been circulating for some time before this, the Melitz paper having appeared as his job market paper in 2000.

New trade theory
This unfortunate term -- unfortunate because it has continued to be used more than forty years after the group of theories that it refers to were introduced, which are therfore not at all new -- may not have been introduced by any one person. Initially, it was simply used to distinguish what were then some recent theories from the older theories of Ricardo and Heckscher-Ohlin-Samuelson. But as no more descriptive or person-specific name came into use, new trade theory became the standard by default. This was surely at least in part because the new trade theory encompassed multiple models by multiple authors, their common characteristic being only that they included one or more of three departures from traditional assumptions: increasing returns to scale, imperfect competition, and product differentiation.

As I search for use of the term new trade theory in Google Scholar, I find nothing at all before 1984. In that year there was only one source that uses these words, Borrus, Tyson, and Zysman (1984), and it wasn't obvious that they thought this was a name for the recent literature but only a convenient way of directing attention to it. Only in 1986 do I find the expression appearing again, and now it showed up in five publications in that year. None of the authors in that year spoke as if they were naming this recent literature themselves. But as Krugman (1986a) used it several times, I am inclined to give him credit for popularizing the term. One other author, and in a volume edited by Krugman, spoke of "the so-called 'new' trade theory," perhaps having heard Krugman and others speak of it.

For many, including perhaps Krugman himself, the new trade theory is most closely associated with his writings, even though many others contributed importantly to it. One might have expected that "Krugman" would have taken his place alongside Ricardo and Heckscher-Ohlin in the name for a trade theory. But that did not happen, perhaps because Krugman himself led with the term new trade theory. There is of course a Krugman Model, but that is only one among many models, by Kruman and others, that are included the the new trade theory.

Normal Trade Relations
This term was adopted in 1998 by the United States Congress to replace Most Favored Nation in certain US statutes. The legislation was signed by President Clinton July 22, 1998, shortly before the debate on MFN China renewal. As it was explained in Senate Report 105-82, "Clarifying the Designation of Normal Trading Relations," September 15, 1997,
    Despite its name, MFN is not a special trading privilege or reward, nor is it the most favorable trade treatment that the United States gives its trading partners. Rather, MFN refers to the normal trade treatment that the United States gives to nearly every country in the world. Because there are only six countries in the world to which the United States does not give MFN status, MFN denotes the ordinary, not the exceptional, trading relationship. Furthermore, the United States extends better than MFN treatment to 150 countries and territories ....

Wikipedia once explained the change as follows, but gave no source (and it no longer appears):

    The impetus for the change in terminology came from irritation voiced by some Americans that various totalitarian governments around the world enjoyed being a MFN of the United States.
I have also been told informally but authoritatively that the change was made because the US was in negotiations with China on accession to the WTO, and President Clinton did not want to say that we would "most favor" China. As one source says, "It was marketing. To a normal person, most-favored sounds like specially good treatment while MFN really is normal." Source

Odious debt
The first use of this term seems to have been by Sack (1927), although as that book is in French, I cannot directly confirm that the term appeared there or that it appeared without reference to an earlier source. My basis for being fairly confident that this was the first use of the term with this meaning -- of debt that may be legitimately not paid back by a successor government -- is a footnote much later in Sack (1947) where he referenced that earlier work:
    ... chapt. IV, pp. 157-184, which introduced, on the basis of constant international practice analyzed therein, the doctrine of "odious" debts of an overthrown or displaced government ...
Beyond that I can only report that Google Scholar finds no earlier occurrences of either "odious debt" or "odious debts" in anything like this context.

This does not mean that the concept in international law was new at that time. Cahn (1950) included a footnote covering almost a full page citing dozens of sources on the topic, only the last and most recent of which was Sack (1927).

Offer curve
The offer curve, without the name, was first developed by Alfred Marshall. It was first published in an Appendix attached to Book III, Chapter VIII, of Marshall (1923), but as he explained in an opening footnote,
    Much of it had been designed to form part of an Appendix to a volume on International Trade, on which a good deal of work was done, chiefly between 1869 and 1873. ....the main body of the present Appendix is reproduced with but little change in substance from that part of the mss. which was privately printed and circulated among economists at home and abroad in 1879.
Marshall himself said he should share credit with others, but he named only Auspitz and Lieben (1879), "in which use is made of diagrams similar to mine, which they had constructed independently." I have viewed that work, which is in German, and did indeed see many diagrams similar to Marshall's. But based on Marshall's above statement, he was the first.

He did not however name it. He referred to his curves throughout only as OE and OG, for England and Germany respectively. Only once did he even use the world "offer" in connection with these curves, saying "E will be prepared to offer only OM′′ of her bales in return for P′′M′′ bales from G."

The best candidate I find for having named the offer curve is Edgeworth (1894). This article was published in three parts, in the second of which, Edgeworth (1894) Part II he showed the curves in various configurations and used the verb "offer" to explain what they represented. Then in the third part, Edgeworth (1894) Part III, discussing a similar diagram of Auspitz and Lieben (1989), he said "Accordingly their supply- or offer- curve is never inelastic in our sense of the term...." That, to me, qualifies Edgeworth as having introduced the term.

Several subsequent authors also used the term, perhaps following Edgeworth or perhaps coming to it on their own. Some used it not to represent international trade, but rather for the supplies and demands of individual consumers. Bowley (1924) however was quite explicit, both in using the diagram which he said had been used "by many writers in the fundamental treatment of foreign trade" (p. 5), and in calling it the offer curve (p. 7). He cited Edgeworth's Mathematical Psychics from 1881 for the concept and mathematics of the equilibrium, but apparently not for the offer curve.

The only other author who deserves mention here, however, is Lerner (1936). In this classic article on the symmetry between import and export taxes, his argument was built entirely on offer curves. In his opening sentence (p. 306) he stated as one of his purposes that he "demonstrates the applicability of Marshall's 'offer curve' apparatus to the elucidation of this problem." His use seemed to assume that readers were already familiar with both the diagram and the name for it, although his use of the quotation marks around it suggests that he didn't see the name as already universally adopted. But the use of the term in this still widely cited paper has surely secured its place in the lexicon of economics.

Ohlin definition
Relative factor abundance and scarcity can be defined either in terms of the relative quantities of factors -- the quantity definition -- or in terms of the relative prices of factors -- the price definition. In most renderings of the Heckscher-Ohlin Model, factor quantities are fixed but factor prices vary with trade, so if the price definition is used, it must be based on factor prices in autarky. The price definition is often attributed to Ohlin (1933) and thus is called the Ohlin definition. The quantity definition is less often given a name, although Bhagwati (1959) called it the Leontief definition, after Leontief1954.

Before Bhagwati (1959), however, Jones (1956) was the first to discuss these definitions extensively, and he repeatedly called the price version either "Ohlin's definition" or the "Ohlin definition." Therefore I attribute this term to Jones.

Others, however, have not always called it the Ohlin definition, instead calling it the "Heckscher-Ohlin definition." In fact Jones himself, in his 1956 dissertation which included much of his 1956 article, in two places also called it the Heckscher-Ohlin definition. As for the quantity definition, Jones gave it no name, once simply calling it "mine."

My search in Google Scholar found only eleven occurrences of "Ohlin definition," with or without "'s" or "Heckscher-", after Bhagwati (1959). Just four of these had "Heckscher-" preceding it. Of the remaining seven, the first three said "Ohlin's," while the last four said "Ohlin." Since 1975, the only term used has been "Ohlin definition," and these were by Helpman and Razin (1978), Maskus (1981), and Chipman (2006). It does appear that, while the terms no longer appear often in any form, "Ohlin definition" has become standard.

This is not really fair to Heckscher, however, since it is clear that Ohlin adopted the price definition from his teacher, Heckscher. Heckscher (1919) included the following passage, which nicely summarized both the price definition and the Heckscher-Ohlin Theorem itself:

    The prerequisites for initiating international trade may thus be summarized as different relative scarcity, i.e., different relative prices of the factors of production in the exchanging countries, as well as different proportions between the factors of production in different commodities. [Italics in original]

Optimal tariff
The terms optimal tariff and optimum tariff carry with them the implication that a positive tariff can be beneficial for a country from an overall economic welfare perspective. That is most often what their use today is meant to mean, rather than referring to the particular size of tariff that will achieve that optimum.

It was long recognized that a tariff, by improving the terms of trade, would provide a benefit that might possibly offset the loss that a tariff also causes by distorting markets. But Bickerdike (1906) was the first to show that this was not only possible but necessary, if there is any terms-of-trade effect at all and if the tariff is not too large.

I've seen some also credit Edgeworth for this, as he addressed this topic in Edgeworth (1894). But as I read that, the result, if present, is hard to discern. And Bickerdike himself says that he is using the offer-curve and indifference-curve tools from Edgeworth (1894) to derive his own result, which he, and presumably his editor, regarded as new.

That there might exist an optimal (or optimum) level of such a tariff, once any benefit is known, follows immediately, since too large a tariff, such as a prohibitive one, must be harmful. But Kahn (1947) was the first to quantify what that optimal tariff might be. He expressed it in terms of elasticities of foreign supply of imports, η, and foreign demand for exports, ε:


Johnson (1951, p. 31) called this the "Bickerdike-Edgeworth-Kahn-Little-Graaf result," although I've been unable to find it in the earlier writings of Bickerdike or Edgewoth, and the last two authors themselves attributed it to Kahn.

In the same place, Johnson himself derived the following different, simpler, and equivalent formulae for "the optimum welfare tariff"":



where Efrd was the "elasticity of the foreign reciprocal demand for exports" and efs was the "foreign elasticity of supply of imports as a function of the [gross] barter terms of trade." With the foreign country supplying good Y in exchange for the tariff-levying country's exports of good X,
     and     
Johnson also showed that these formulae were equivalent to Kahn's.

If foreign demand is inelastic, as is quite possible and appears as a backward-bending foreign offer curve, foreign supply elasticity is negative and these formulae suggest a negative tariff. That is misleading, however, as the optimum would instead be a tariff large enough to move along the foreign offer curve to where demand is instead elastic. The message here is therefore not that one can determine the optimal tariff simply by measuring the foreign trade elasticity if that were possible, since that elasticity will likely change when the tariff is levied. The formulae only allow one to know, once a tariff is in place, whether it is optimal.

Turning now to the origins of the terms optimal tariff and optimum tariff themselves, the first to come close to saying either was Kaldor (1940, p. 379) who spoke of the "optimal rate of import duty." He identified it in his diagram as that which achieves an offer-curve equilibrium at the tangency between the foreign offer curve and a trade indifference curve (without that name), but he did not attempt to quantify it.

It was Scitovszky (1942) who first used the term optimum tariff, as did both Kahn (1947) and Johnson (1951,1953/54) for their quantifications of it in terms of elasticities. Only in 1956 was Fleming (1956) the first use optimal tariff in print, in his title "The Optimal Tariff from an International Standpoint." It caught on, being used by many authors after that, although optimum tariff also continued to be used by many. Google's Ngram plot of the two terms shows that optimum tariff dominated optimal tariff until 1985, after which optimal tariff took the lead, and then use of both soon declined.

My own view is that optimal tariff should be preferred, as "optimal" is clearly an adjective, while "optimum" is primarily a noun.

Paradox of Plenty
The phrase "paradox of plenty" has been used in other contexts since the 1930s, but it was introduced to the international economic context by Karl (1997), a few years after what has become the somewhat more common term meaning the same thing, resource curse.

I've found uses of paradox of plenty in multiple contexts over the years, ranging from "osteopetrosis and rickets" to pesticides. But the first uses of the term that I found were from, and about, the Great Depression. It first appeared in the title of a 1932 book by Harper Leech, The Paradox of Plenty, where it referred to the abundant potential availability of food and other things while the population was too poor to afford them. For several decades, most uses of the term referred to this and cited Leech.

In 1993, the term was used again in the title of a book by Harvey Levenstein, Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in America. He too started with the Great Depression and the coexistence of soup kitchens and bread lines together with surpluses of milk, pigs, and grain. But he carried the term into the subsequent decades of actions by government and the private sector that expanded the availability of food while having questionable impact on nutrition.

Karl, too, used the phrase in the title of her book, followed by the subtitle "Oil Booms and Petro States," making clear the difference from its uses by Leech and Levenstein. As she explained on page 242,

    Lessons from the past suggest a perverse relationship between some forms of natural-resource endowment and successful state-building. History is replete with examples of the development failures of mining states.
She went on to discuss such failures in Spain, Peru, and Chile, and continued
    Viewing Latin American reality through the prism of these mineral booms and busts, novelist Eduaro Galeano (1973) has wryly noted that the continent's poverty was the consequence of its natural wealth. Conversely, just as Adam Smith once observed about the Tartars, Asian NICs may be rich precisely because they are resource poor. The need to overcome this poverty may have been one of the chief catalysts for building effective states.
Karl's book was published in 1997, but the term "paradox of plenty" appeared much earlier in her 1982 PhD dissertation, Karl (1982), where she used the term for what happened in Venezuela:
    The coincidence of Perez' electoral landslide with the oil boom created a paradox of plenty: unlimited political power and seemingly unlimited resources. The apparent lack of constraints permitted demoagogic and authoritarian patterns of economic decision-making.
Oddly, Google Scholar finds another passage using the term,
    ... This "paradox of plenty" can best be explained by the interplay of an internationally-generated crisis of wealth with the skewed socio-economic arrangements and weak states ...
Yet this passage does not appear in the version of the dissertation that I was able to download.

While Karl's book was not published until 1997, long after the dissertation, I found many citations of it including the term paradox of plenty before that, as early as 1994 listing it as "forthcoming" or "in press." And Karl herself used the term in other publications in 1990 and 1991.

I would note that the main earlier uses of paradox of plenty associated plenty with poverty, but they did not -- as far as I know -- suggest that the plenty had caused the poverty. In contrast, as the above passage from Karl makes clear, her paradox of plenty does imply that resource abundance causes weak political systems to create disfunction and poverty. This is consistent with the message of the alternative term, resource curse that I define as equivalent to paradox of plenty.

Karl (1982) did not use the term "resource curse," though she did on page 19 say "great wealth, it appeared, could be a curse as well as a blessing." Nor did Auty (1992), the coiner of resource curse, mention paradox of plenty, as far as I can tell from Google Books (I have not accessed the book itself). The two terms seem to have appeared independently. Perhaps not surprisingly, Google NGrams tells us that "resource curse" has been much more widely used than paradox of plenty, though the latter has continued to be used regularly:

Pauper labor argument
The first use I've found of the phrase pauper labor argument was by Lieber (1869). (I also searched with the British spelling, "labour," but found little relevant to this argument for tariffs, even later.) Lieber also gave one of the best statements the argument itself. After dismissing a case for protecting capital instead of labor, he said:
    It came speedily, therefore, to be supplanted by what, for brevity's sake, we will call the Pauper Labor argument. This it is: Wages in Europe are miserably low; hardly sufficient to furnish sustenance to the workmen, whose labor therefore is called pauper labor. Now the products of this ill-requited labor can be furnished for a far lower price than American products, because we pay higher wages to our workmen; and ought to do so, since our workman is a citizen of a republic, who ought to live in a fair degree of independence, and to be able to clothe and educate his children well; therefore let us prevent the competition of European pauper labor with our American labor by levying a high duty on the products of the former, or let us exclude them altogether.
Like most others who later used the term, Lieber was critical of this argument.

My search in Google Scholar for pauper labor argument finds nothing before this, and also nothing later after it until 1880, when it appeared as a section heading in McAdam (1880). Then, a few years later, Wells (1885) had a chapter titled "The 'Foreign Competitive Pauper-Labor' Argument for Protection," and he used the phrase three more times in his discussion. Neither McAdam nor Wells cited any source for the phrase, so I do not know whether either may have gotten it from Lieber. But in any case, the phrase then passed into common usage, probably due to Wells. His book of essays had a second edition two years later, and it is still available from Amazon, which says "This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it."

The argument itself, as opposed to the phrase identifying it, seems to have originated in the United States. Two sources cited American politician Henry Clay as making the argument as part of the case for his American System. I've done my best to search the writings of Clay himself, but I have been unable to find any mention by him of pauper labor. One source, however, quoted Clay as fearing that "our money would be thus drawn from us to support the pauper labor of Europe." Another credited Clay with wanting the United States to be "independent of the pauper labor of other nations." And Clay was the leader of the Whig party at the time, which published a policy agenda on July 25, 1844, that included the following: Source

    We will remark in the first place, that among the important measures loudly called for, by the country, and demanded by the exigencies of the times, was a Tariff, which would afford a home market for our agricultural products, and give protection to our manufactures and citizens, over the pauper labor of Europe....
So while I cannot find a direct source of Clay using pauper labor as an argument for protection, there is enough other indirect evidence of his doing so that I am inclined to credit him with it.

I would note that what is distinctive about this argument is the use of the word "pauper." Presumably it was not unusual to expect that trade between two countries with different levels of wages might reduce the higher of the two. This, of course, is exactly what we now expect from the much later Stolper-Samuelson Theorem of the Heckscher-Ohlin model. But the emphasis in the pauper labor argument is not just that a high wage will fall, but that it will fall to such a level for laborers to become paupers. One Webster's definition of "pauper" is "a person destitute of means except such as are derived from charity," which is inconsistent with a pauper earning a wage as a laborer. But a second definition is simply "a very poor person." It may well be this ambiguity that made the use of the word "pauper" attractive, since it associated low-wage workers with beggars.

Exactly why Clay and other advocates of the pauper labor argument thought that wages in Europe were that low, I do not know. But one source, Burke (1846) p. 23, took pains to argue against that:

    I have been copious in my facts touching this point, because I desired to put at rest forever the falsehood that the wages of labor are much, if any lower in England than in this country; and that a high prohibitory tariff is necessary, in order to protect the American manufacturer against his rival in England -- in the catch-phrase of the day, the "pauper" labor of Europe.

Peso problem
The term is often attributed to Milton Friedman, who apparently commented on the market for the Mexican peso in the early 1970s and explained Mexico's high (relative to the US) interest rate by the concern that the peso would be devalued, which it later was. It is not clear that Friedman actually used the term peso problem, however. Paul Krugman, in his blog on July 15, 2008, said that the term was coined in the "MIT grad student lunchroom," perhaps by him or perhaps by Bill Krasker, who he said "published the first paper using the term" in Krasker (1980).

Policy space
Although the term or a variant began to be used in UNCTAD discussions and documents in the early 2000s, it was defined explicitly in the São Paulo Consensus of UNCTAD (2004, p. 2): "...the space for national economic policy, i.e., the scope for domestic policies, especially in the areas of trade, investment and industrial development, is now often framed by international disciplines, commitments and global market considerations."

Precautionary Principle
This expression has appeared a few times in the past, not as the name of a principle but simply as a descriptive adjective, as in "we advocate for the use of vaccines following the precautionary principle that risk of illness should be avoided." As a more agreed-upon principle several sources say that it originated in Germany, under the name Vorsorgeprinzip, used especially in environmental contexts as meaning to take action in advance so as to prevent harm, rather than wait to fix the harm after it has been done. This was said by Weidner (1986) to be included in the 1971 Environmental Programme of West Germany as follows:
    Precautionary Principle: Environmental policy is not limited to preventing immediate threats and removing damage that has already been caused, but demands that considerable efforts have to be made in order to prevent environmental damage from occurring in the future.
According to Christiansen (1994), "The precautionary principle is said to have made its way into English during the early 1980s as the translation of the German Vorsorgeprinzip (see von Moltke 1988)." I have so far been unable to access the Moltke reference.

As the term has been used more recently, however, it includes not just taking or blocking action to prevent harm, but specifically doing so even when the science has not conclusively demonstrated the need to do so. The Precautionary Principle in this modern sense seems to have appeared first in the 1987 North Sea Conference. Its Second North Sea Ministerial Declaration includes the following under paragraph VII:

    Accepting that, in order to protect the North Sea from possibly damaging effects of the most dangerous substances, a precautionary approach is necessary which may require action to control inputs of such substances even before a causal link has been established by absolutely clear scientific evidence;
While this calls it a precautionary approach, later in the document it includes, under paragraph XVI.1, ..."even where there is no scientific evidence to prove a causal link between emissions and effects ('the principle of precautionary action')"

The term came into wider use in the 1992 meeting of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development. The Rio Declaration from that conference, Agenda 21 (1992), again spoke repeatedly of a "precautionary approach." Paragraph 35.3 states the following:

    In the face of threats of irreversible environmental damage, lack of full scientific understanding should not be an excuse for postponing actions which are justified in their own right. The precautionary approach could provide a basis for policies relating to complex systems that are not yet fully understood and whose consequences of disturbances cannot yet be predicted.

The two terms Precautionary Principle and Precautionary Approach have both been in common use since the late 1980's. Google NGram reports the first of these terms appearing more than four times as often as the second when they peaked in the early 2000's. So it seems that Precautionary Principle is now the more standard term.

Price-specie flow mechanism
The mechanism -- by which a balance of payments surplus or deficit causes an inflow or outflow of money (specie) and a resulting rise or fall of prices that eliminates the imbalance -- was first laid out most clearly by Hume (1777). He made his point by imagining first cutting the stock of money substantially and arguing how this will change wages and prices so as to induce flows to restore balance, which he followed with a similar story for an initial increase in the stock of money (p. 311):
    Suppose four-fifths of all the money in Great Britain to be annihilated in one night.... Must not the price of all labour and commodities sink in proportion...?, What nation could then dispute with us in any foreign market...? Therefore, must this bring back the money which we had lost. Where, after we have arrived, we immediately lose the advantage ... and the farther flowing in of money is stopped.

Although Hume is today routinely credited with this idea, several other authors anticipated it, if not as clearly. Viner (1937, p. 74) credited Cantillon (1730) where "the self-regulating mechanism is clearly and ably expounded." I have tried to follow Cantillon's exposition, and I am not sure that I would have understood the mechanism from that.

The mechanism has often been called just the specie flow mechanism, though that de-emphasizes the role of prices, the role of which was not always recognized by other authors. The term price-specie flow mechanism entered the literature with Angell (1926), who dealt with it in detail.

Purchasing power parity
It was Cassel (1918, p. 413) who introduced the term in the context of discussing how exchange rates should be reset after World War I and the large differences in inflation that occurred in different countries, especially Sweden and England.
    The general inflation which has taken place during the war has lowered this purchasing power in all countries, though in a very different degree, and the rates of exchanges should accordingly be expected to deviate from their old parity in proportion to the inflation of each country.
       At every moment the real patity between two countries is represented by this quotient between the purchasing power of the money in the one country and the other. I propose to call this parity "the purchasing power parity." [Italics in original.]
The idea, though not the name for it, is much older than that, said to date back at least to the 16th century.

Rent seeking
Rent seeking was introduced to the trade literature by Krueger (1974), who defined it generally but applied it to quantitative restrictions on trade. She noted (p. 291) that government restrictions on economic activity "give rise to rents ..., and people often compete for the rents." She called this competition rent seeking, a term that she apparently coined and that has caught on hugely.

Resource curse
The source for this was Auty (1993), which had the phrase it its title, Sustaining Development in Mineral Economies: The Resource Curse Thesis. I have not yet been able to access the book itself, but I found no other use of the phrase prior to 1992, and in 1992 one source used it in quotation marks, as though it was from somewhere else. Auty himself cited his book in a 1993 paper as being from 1992, so it must have existed a while before that and already become familiar to others.

Second-best argument for protection
The introduction of the term second best in the context of protection was by Meade (1955b), who included four chapters on "The Second-Best Argument for Trade Control" with subheadings "The raising of revenue," "The Partial Freeing of Trade," "Domestic Divergences," and "Dumping as a complex case."

The classic paper establishing that trade policy is only second best in general for dealing with domestic distortions was Bhagwati and Ramaswami (1963), who did not cite Meade. However, they also did not use the term second best, and the point of their contribution was to argue for policies superior to trade policies. The term second best was adopted by Lipsey and Lancaster (1956), attributing it to Meade, but their application to tariffs was concerned only with the optimal level of one tariff when another is non-zero. By 1969, in Bhagwati et al. (1969), Bhagwati too was using the second best terminology, but again his and his co-authors' main point was that tariffs are not even second best but only at most third best when other policies can be adjusted. Thus trade economists have generally used the second-best argument against protection rather than for protection.

If policies superior to tariffs are not available, however, the argument may become one in favor of protection. Thus in its simplest form, a government that is unable to levy any other kind of tax but requires revenue in order to function will use tariffs no matter how far down the list from first-best tariffs may lie. This has presumably been understood since long before the distorting effects of tariffs were examined by economists. And even here, the argument should have been subject to the caveat that the benefits from the government activity must outweigh the welfare losses due to the tariff.

This is equally true in more complex cases. The infant industry argument depends on distortions that prevent infant industries from reaping the full benefits of their production. The first-best policy is to correct or offset that distortion, perhaps by a production subsidy. But if production subsidies are unavailable (not just rejected politically, since that should in principle apply even more to a tariff, if it were fully understood), then a second-best tariff will be beneficial if not too large.

Seigniorage
The origin of this term is mentioned by Eichengreen (2011, p. 6):
    That difference between what it costs the government to print a note and a foreigner to procure it is known as "seigniorage" after the right of the medieval lord, or seigneur, to coin money and keep for himself some of the precious metal from which it was made."

Social dumping
This term is a good deal older than I had supposed, appearing with very much the current meaning as early as 1928, and perhaps earlier.

The earliest use I find of the term itself is in Krüger (1926):

    The accusation that German industry in trying to increase production is practising social dumping against foreign countries is untenable in view of the working hours in those countries and the additional burden imposed upon the national production of Germany by defeat.
The focus here was on hours of work, and I cannot be sure that social dumping was being used with its current meaning.

That ambiguity does not apply, however, to the use I find of the term in 1928. A bibliography of "Recent Labour Legislation" in International Labour Review 19(4), April 1929, pp. 575-619 lists a book in German, Baer (1928) with the title Das soziale Dumping and a summary that begins:

    Dr. Baer has done useful work by his attempt to elucidate the idea underlying the expression "social dumping" and his examination of its practical applications. His book is arranged in three chapters ; the first deals with "social dumping" in the general acceptation of the term, i.e. exportation on the basis of a comparative advantage attributed to lower conditions of labour (lower wage level, longer hours of work, smaller cost of social services, etc.) in the exporting than in the importing country.
It appears from this that Baer may have introduced the term with its current meaning, although the phrase "general acceptation of the term" suggests it was already in use.

Special Drawing Right
Special drawing rights (SDRs) were officially created and named by the IMF in August, 1969, after several years of discussion and negotiation regarding both their function and their name. The story starts with that of the IMF itself.

The IMF was created at Bretton Woods, where countries agreed to a new system for managing exchange rates. Each country's currency would be pegged to the US dollar through intervention in the exchange market. That intervention required that countries have available international reserves of US dollars or gold in order to buy or sell their own currency as needed to maintain the peg.

In order to make reserves available for that purpose, members of the IMF were each assigned an IMF quota: an amount of money (their own, other currencies, and gold) that they would contribute to IMF holdings. The IMF would then lend from these funds to members when needed. Each member can request to borrow from the IMF in what are called tranches, each equal to 25% of their quota. The first of these, called the "gold tranche," is more or less automatically approved, while the subsequent ones, "credit tranches," require increasingly onerous documentation of need.

This facility was not officially called "drawing rights," by the IMF, but that term came to be commonly used, as explained by Gold (1971, p. 6):

    The terms "drawings" and "drawing rights" were not included in any texts submitted at the Bretton Woods Conference, and it is doubtful that "drawing rights" would have been received benignly by all negotiators. That term might have conveyed an impression of assured access to the Fund's resources, and although some negotiators advocated assured access, others resisted it.
I have described these transactions as loans that must be repaid, but formally they were not. They were purchases (of another currency with one's own) that must eventually be reversed, as also explained by Gold (1971, p. 5):
    ... drawing rights are transactions of purchase and sale. A member buys the currencies of other members from the Fund and pays for the purchase with its own currency. For various reasons the transaction is not a loan, even though under the Fund's policies the transaction has to be reversed within three to five years at the outside.

From the start, this system was troubled by the difficulty of providing the world with an adequate supply of these reserve assets that could be trusted to hold their value and would also grow over time with the growing world economy and even faster growth of international transactions. Initially, in the aftermath of World War II when only the US was able to produce and export, there was a "dollar shortage," but as other economies improved, this eventually turned into a "dollar glut" caused by chronic US balance of payments deficits.

This created what came to be called Triffin's Dilemma: in order to expand international US dollar reserves, the world needed the US to run deficits, but these deficits undermined confidence that the dollar would hold its value. Many recognized the need for there to be an new reserve asset, in addition to the US dollar and gold, and discussions began of what this would be.

Initial discussions were conducted within the Group of Ten. As explained by Solomon (1996), p. 28,

    To deal with the Triffin dilemma, ... the United States also proposed a study in the Group of Ten of ways to ensure the adequacy of international liquidity. President Kennedy, in a balance of payments message in July 1963, endorsed the idea of a study, stating that "one of the reasons that new sources of liquidity may well be needed is that, as we close our payments gap, we will cut down our provision of dollars to the rest of the world."
Discussions were also the initial purpose of the Bellagio Group, and continued at the IMF.

Central among the disagreements to be resolved was whether a new reserve asset would be a new "unit" that could be used alongside dollars and gold in exchange for currencies. Or would it be like the IMF's drawing rights that were more like loans. "French officials put forward a proposal for a new reserve asset, a 'collective reserve unit' (CRU) that would be linked to gold and would be created and used outside the IMF by the member countries of the Group of Ten." (Solomon (1996), p. 29) "The United States preferred the concept of a drawing right to a unit out of concern that a unit would be too obvious a competitor for the dollar." (Solomon (1996), p. 31)

As (Solomon (1996), p. 34) explained:

    ... what emerged ... was a rough outline or sketch of a reserve creation scheme based on drawing rights. They were initially called "reserve drawing rights" but since the French representatives objected to the word reserve, it was bracketed. The French suggested that "reserve" be replaced by "special." In any event, there was broad agreement that a proposal could be presented to the IMF Annual Meeting scheduled for Rio de Janeiro in September 1967.
So it appears that the name "special drawing right" owes its existence to the French representatives participating in this discussion, whoever they were.

I have not been able to locate the agreement that was reached at that 1967 meeting, which apparently was incorporated into the IMF's Articles of Agreement as they appear today, having been amended in 1969 and later. But a Note by Ehrlich et al. (1968), p. 871) refers to the agreement explicitly using the term Special Drawing Right:

    The Special Drawing Rights Agreement by the International Monetary Fund members, signed at Rio de Janeiro last year, provides the major focus of the Note. The Rio Accord contains only the broad outlines of the new arrangment.
From this it is clear that the name Special Drawing Right had been officially adopted.

I should mention that the purpose intended to be served by the SDR became unnecessary within a few years of its creation, as the system of pegged exchange rates collapsed, initially in 1971 and finally in 1973. However, countries continued to need reserves even under floating exchange rates, and the need for them continued to increase. As a result, the IMF has allocated additional SDRs to its members on four occasions, most recently an allocation of 456.6 billion SDRs (worth US$650 billion) in 2021 that "helped countries respond to the COVID-19 pandemic." [Source]

In the end, while the French lost the debate on whether the new reserve facility would be a money-like "unit" or a loan-like drawing right, they not only determined its name but also led to what today is essentially a currency used for transactions among central banks. What is special about SDRs is that when holders use them to purchase another country's currency, that other country's central bank acquires the SDRs which they can then use themselves, very much unlike the IMF's other drawing rights and like money. Investopedia, for example, defines the SDR as follows:

    Special drawing rights (SDR) refer to an international type of monetary reserve currency created by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in 1969. It operates as a supplement to the existing money reserves of member countries.
Indeed, SDRs meet all three of the usual requirements to be defined as money:
  • Medium of exchange: They can be used by central banks to purchase currencies from other central banks.
  • Store of value: Their value as now defined as a basket of major currencies.
  • Unit of account: The IMF itself uses them for its international accounts.
Splinternet
The Economist (Nov 22, 2016) said the word and concept were not new, as a whole book had been written about it. That seems to have been Malcomson (2016). However, the term became common in online discussions well before that. The first use of the word that I can find was by Tehrani (2008), but referring to the fragmentation of the World Wide Web by companies, not by countries or governments. Facebook, as the most familiar example, had become a sort of web-within-the-web, where websites would appear that were not reachable without entering Facebook itself. Later the same year, Searls (2008) used the term in the title of a blog post dealing with the role of national boundaries, although here the concern was with companies such as Apple that treated users differently from different countries, presumably in their effort to conform with national laws. Neither source mentioned the efforts by governments such as China to wall off their portion of the internet in the way that Malcomson (2016) was most concerned with. The word splinternet came to be used in a great many sources online during 2010 and after, and I have not tried to find where the deliberate splintering by government was first included in the term.

Stylized fact
The source if this expression would appear to be very simple, as I found numerous authors who cited Kaldor (1957) as introducing it. In a review of a volume that contains a reprint of his essay, Lipsey (1962) complemented Kaldor for basing his theorizing on "a series of 'stylised facts,' a device which prevents Mr. Kaldor's theorising from departing, as growth theories so often do ... for a world that is not our own." Kaldor instead intended to explain "what is currently believed to be the state of the world." This expression might well serve as well as any to define what might be meant by stylised facts.

However, the expression stylised facts did not appear in Kaldor's article, nor in its reprint. Instead, Kaldor said on page 591

    A satisfactory model concerning the nature of the growth process in a capitalist economy must also account for the remarkable historical constancies revealed by recent empirical investigations.
He followed this on page 592 not with a list but with a paragraph that included several of these "remarkable historical constancies," such as the "remarkable constancy" of the share of wages, that the capital/output ratio was virtually unchanged over a long period, and the "constancy in the rate of profit earned on investments." These and other historical constancies were documented on the same page in footnotes to extensive empirical work by others.

How, then, did it come about that so many have attributed the phrase stylised facts to Kaldor (1957)? I suspect that he probably did use the term in his early draft and in his presentations of his work to colleagues, who may then never have felt the need to read the published version. And I would go on to suggest that its removal from the published version may have been at the insistance of the editor, who felt that the work should be based on true facts, not stylized ones, and may have pushed Kaldor to include their sources.

However, I do find Kaldor using the term explicitly in Kaldor (1961) where he seemed to be introducing the term himself for the first time in a passage that nicely explained why he found it useful:

    Hence the theorist, in choosing a particular theoretical approach, ought to start off with a summary of the facts which he regards as relevant to his problem. Since facts, as recorded by statisticians, are always subject to numerous snags and qualifications, and for that reason are incapable of being accurately summarized, the theorist, in my view, should be free to start off with a 'stylized' view of the facts - i.e. concentrate on broad tendencies, ignoring individual detail, and proceed on the 'as if' method, i.e. construct a hypothesis that could account for these 'stylized' facts, without necessarily committing himself on the historical accuracy, or sufficiency, of the facts or tendencies thus summarized.

This is an excellent justification not just of the term but also for using information that does not quite qualify to be called "facts." Indeed, economic data when Kaldor was writing were much scarcer and probably less accurate than they are today, but they were no less useful for motivating understanding of the world. Sadly (in my view), the term stylised facts has become widely used, and it is often applied in situations where the facts are just facts.

Tariffication
This word, which I had supposed was created to describe the conversion of quotas and other NTBs into equivalent tariffs, turns out to have been in use long before for a different purpose. The prices charged on a wide variety of products and services are called "tariffs," and the setting of those prices seems routinely to have been called tariffication.

I find the first use of a form of the word in the context of international trade policy in Wijkman (1986) who, however, wrote it as "re-tariffication" (p. 47):

    A likely outcome might consist of phasing out quantitative restrictions, either through negotiating their elimination on a reciprocal basis or by replacing them by tariffs representing an equivalent level of protection ('re-tariffication').
This form of the word was used by at least one other, but writers converged on tariffication in 1988.

The earliest appearance that I find is in Zietz (1988) who advocated its use in negotiations on trade barriers in agriculture. Whether others were already using the term at that time, I don't know, and it is certainly true that others were advocating the substance of tariffication, though without using the word. Wolf (1985), as an early example, was advocating the replacement of quotas by tariffs as a means of "unraveling" the Multi-Fibre Arrangement.

The term came very much into its own in 1989, when the United States tabled a proposal to use tariffication in the Uruguay Round negotiations on agriculture. I have not been able to access the US document itself to see whether it used the term, but around the same time, in writings by others about the US action, the term was certainly used, if not with approval. Economist (1989) called it a "monstrous word":

    The farm negotiations will resume in earnest next week. This time they look more promising, thanks to American proposals for "tariffication". That is a monstrous word for a sensible idea: the conversion of import quotas, variable levies, sluice-gate prices and all other border measures on farm trade into equivalent tariffs.

Technology gap model
Those who write about technology gap models routinely cite Posner (1961) as the first of several papers with this idea. That was true for the idea, but not the term. Posner's paper included neither the word technology nor the word gap. It was Hufbauer (1966) who elaborated Posner's idea and spoke of a "technological gap account" of trade. Krugman (1986b) may have been the first to formalize the model to modern standards, and he certainly used the words technology gap in his title. One source cited the same Krugman (1986) paper but listed it as presented at the "Conference of the International Economic Association, Sweden, 1982," suggesting that the switch from technological to technology may have originated by 1982 with Krugman. I have found no earlier use of the term technology gap.

Terms of trade
The phrase terms of trade was first used with more or less its modern meaning by Marshall (1923), p. 161. In an example involving countries E and G, he spoke of "the amounts to which E and G would be severally willing to trade at various 'terms of trade'; or, to use a phrase which is more appropriate in some connections, at various 'rates of exchange.'" He then explained his preference for the new term on the grounds that "rates of exchange" could be understood to connote monetary exchange rates, while he meant the rate at which goods are traded for other goods.

Having introduced the expression in the book, Marshall then used it in subsequent discussions, but he did not use it exclusively. He seemed to alternate between "terms of trade" and "rate of interchange," two expressions that seemed to be synonyms as he used them.

There is slight uncertainty as to whether this was Marshall's first use of the expression. This is because it also appeared in Appendix J of the same book, which a footnote explained was largely written much earlier, between 1869 and 1873, and which was "privately printed and circulated among economists at home and abroad in 1879." (p. 330). However, Appendix J with only very few exceptions does not use terms of trade, but rather alternates between "rate of interchange" and "exchange index." It seems likely that the few (I only found two) occurrences of terms of trade in that appendix were added when it was presumably revised for its 1923 publication. This is supported by the fact that terms of trade does not appear at all in the 1920 8th edition of Marshall's (1890) Principles.

Was Marshall the first to use the term? Taussig (1927) said so, citing Marshall (1923). And I have confirmed that Mill (1848) did not use the term. That of course leaves open a great many others who might have. But from the way Marshall introduced the term, it appears that he, at least, thought it was new.

Variations on the Terms of Trade

Taussig (1927), after explaining Marshall's preference for "terms of trade" over "rate of exchange," went on "to reduce still further the possibilities of misunderstanding" by refining the expression as barter terms of trade, emphasizing that it referred to the rate at which goods are exchanged for other goods. Taussig also distinguished net and gross barter terms of trade, the latter allowing for total amounts paid even when they differ from prices due to trade imbalances that might arise from, say, reparation payments.

Viner(1937) argued that the classical economists were concerned not just with the rates at which goods exchanged for one another, but also with the rates at which factors exchange, through their production of goods and trade. He therefore introduced the factoral terms of trade, both single and double.

Finally, Dorrance (1948) suggested income terms of trade as an alternative to all the others, which he argued gave a misleading indication of the extent to which a country was gaining from trade when markets were in disequilibrium, as he said had become more common in the mid-20th century. A rise in a country's barter terms of trade, due to a rise in its prices relative to the price of imports, could be harmful if it mainly caused a fall in the quantity it was able to sell. The income terms of trade, because it related the value of exports -- price times quantity -- to the price of imports, would correctly record a decline if the price increase was more than offset by a quantity decrease.

To summarize, let pX, X, AX be the price, quantity, and productivity of factors producing exports respectively and pM, M, AM be the same for imports. We then have:

Variations of the Terms of Trade
Commodity terms of trade
    = Net barter terms of trade:
    NBTT = pX/pM
Gross barter terms of trade: GBTT = M/X
Single factoral terms of trade: SFTT = (Px/Pm)×Ax
Double factoral terms of trade: DFTT = (Px/Pm)×(Ax/Am)
Income terms of trade: ITT = PXX/PM

Up or Down

As defined above, a rise in the terms of trade is an "improvement," in the sense that the country is getting more in return for what it exports. That has been the convention followed by most authors, who have defined it as pX/pM, but not all. Some have defined it as pM/pX, in which case a decline in the terms of trade is an improvement.

Marshall himself treated the terms of trade as a property of the transaction, not of either country, and thus his terms of trade was just the relative price of two goods, the identities of which were arbitrary. Also, a great many of those who have used the concept of the terms of trade have not needed to define it quantitatively, since they could speak simply of the terms of trade improving or deteriorating. But others have needed to incorporate the terms of trade into an economic model or report it as empirical data, and for either purpose it was necessary to choose either pX/pM or pM/pX.

The first to do this was Taussig (1927), who spoke of and reported data for the terms of trade of Great Britain, Canada, and the United States. For each he chose to define it as pM/pX, with the result that when his curves declined, that was beneficial for the country. Viner (1937) made the opposite choice, remarking in a footnote (p. 558) that

Viner's choice has been followed by economists studying both international trade and international development ever since.

However, the opposite choice has often been made by economists studying international monetary, macroeconomic, and financial issues. This seems to have started with Obstfeld (1980, p. 463) who had "... the terms of trade, defined as the price of foreign consumption goods in terms of home goods." This was not his choice when writing with Rogoff in the definitive textbook of the field, Obstfeld and Rogoff (1996), who on p. 25 said "In general a country's terms of trade are defined as the price of its exports in terms of its imports." But the same two authors, writing later, reverted to pM/pX, as have many (but not all) authors in that subfield writing since.

Thank-you note
As a policy to respond to a foreign subsidy. I attribute this to Paul Krugman fairly early in his career. I have, however, been unable to track down where he actually said it. I once asked him directly, but he couldn't recall.

Third World
Explained in The Economist, "Seeing the World Differently," June 10, 2010.
    But the term third world did not originally refer to geopolitics. The first to use it in its modern sense was Alfred Sauvy, a French demographer who drew a parallel with the "third estate" (the people) during the French revolution. In 1952 Sauvy wrote that "this ignored, exploited, scorned Third World, like the Third Estate, wants to become something, too." He was paraphrasing a remark by Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès, a delegate to the Estates-General of 1789, who said the third estate is everything, has nothing but wants to be something. The salient feature of the third world was that it wanted economic and political clout.

Trade deflection
Shibata (1967, p. 151) defines this as a "redirection of imports from third countries through the partner country with the lowest tariff, with the sole aim of realizing tax advantage by exploiting the rate differentials between the member countries within an economic union." He notes that trade deflection had previously been defined in the Stockholm Convention, which established the European Free Trade Association, but somewhat more narrowly and differently as arising from difference in tariffs on raw materials or intermediate inputs that allows a final good to be exported from one member to another of an FTA.

Transnational corporation
My Glossary entry for transnational corporation has two definitions. The second says, "A corporation whose national identity is a matter of convenience only, and that will move its headquarters readily in response to incentives." I wrote that before I was documenting my sources, and I now have no idea where I got it. By googling this expression now, I only find my own Glossary, plus one other source that clearly copied it from me without attribution. (I've always been very careful never to duplicate text that I've found elsewhere without putting it in quotation marks, and that is almost always from a source to which I've included a hyperlink.)

I will concentrate here, therefore, on my first definition, "Same as multinational corporation, though for some reason this term seems to be preferred by those who don't like them." As for the first half of this, my search now for definitions mostly finds the two terms transnational corporation (TNC) and multinational corporation (MNC) to be alternatives for the same thing: a corporation that operates in more than one country.

A few authors do make a distinction between TNC and MNC, but on my reading they do not agree on what that distinction is. Oxford Reference, for example "contrasts" TNC with MNC, saying that while the former is controlled from a home country and has operations in many, the latter has multiple aspects, including control, that "span national boundaries." Another source says in one definition that a TNC has "global scope but no central headquarters," while still another seems to say the opposite: that MNCs have facilities in multiple countries and that "each operates as its own entity rather than forming the integrated network characteristic of transnational companies." Source

Robinson (1967, p. 154) may have been the first to carefully delineate the various forms of corporation in the international context, identifying fully six different "types": A=Domestic; B=Foreign oriented; C=International; and D=Multinational; E=Transnational; and F= Supranational. He distinguished MNCs and TNCs by a difference in "attitude":

    Type E, the "transnational firm," becomes such when its members develop loyalty to the firm of a sort that transcends national identity, thus eliminating national bias in decision-making and making possible a geographically optimum allocation of corporate resources. Corporate headquarters itself becomes multinational in terms of personnel. Indeed, key decision-makers may, in fact, no longer reside in the parent country.
I rather like that Robinson made a distinction suggesting how a TNC might behave differently from an MNC, but I'm pretty sure, from the many uses of both terms in subsequent literature, that most authors did not follow him. To most, TMCs and MNCs were simply large corporations that span national borders.

The first use I can find of the term transnational corporation was Carlston (1956). In a discussion of the role of international trade in "world society," he said (p. 93) "The transactions of international trade involve the meshing of a vast number of organisations, many of them of great size." He goes on to say (p. 94):

    These transactions cannot be resolved into the simple, primitive patterns of conduct of individual buyers and sellers in a single market place; they take place through the functioning of corporate organisations cutting across State boundaries. These transnational corporations become a part of the national life in each of the countries in which they operate. Their employees are for the most part citizens of each such country and their economic product becomes statistically a part of the economic product of each such country. Yet, as a social system, the transnational corporation is a discrete organisation having a life of its own in that it embraces a series of functions all co-ordinated by a commonly accepted authority. In other words, 'international trade' is the product of institutionalised patterns of conduct primarily found centred in the transnational corporation and in other organisations of an established character.
Carlston did not seem to be coining a term for these large companies, but merely using the adjective "transnational" to capture that their actions are "cutting across State boundaries." Whether others adopted the term from him or only used it independently for the same descriptive reason, I don't know. Carlston was writing for a legal audience, and the next two occurrences that I find for transnational corporation were both in law journals, in 1960 and 1962. At the same time, "transnational" was becoming such a standard term in legal scholarship that it entered the name of a new journal, The Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, in 1961, and at least six other law journals after that.

I think it is fair to say that most of these early references to TNCs in the legal literature were not particularly critical of them. The one exception I came across was de Passalacqua (1968), a dissertation on international law that included only one mention of transnational corporations but noting a negative aspect of them (p. 155):

    The development of the transnational corporation has introduced a problem closely resembling that of classical interventions. Under certain circumstances, such corporations are able to gain control of the country where they are carrying on their business.
After that, it is only in the early 1970s that I begin to find others writing very critically about TNCs.

I have not figured out a way to learn whether particular uses of the term transnational corporation include negative, positive, or neutral connotations without reading them in context, and I did that only through 1973, for which Google Scholar found 20 sources using the term. Of these, six had negative orientations. The numbers of sources mentioning it per year grew quickly, to 133 in 1980, 168 in 1990, 515 in 2000, and 1,130 in 2010. I have no easy way to learn what fraction of these used TNC with a negative connotation, nor to compare this with the uses of other terms such as MNC. My own statement, included in my Glossary definition, that TNC is preferred by those who view them negatively is still, therefore, just my own very subjective impression.

I like to conclude these notes on origins of terms with my judgement of who should get credit for introducing them. In this case, I cannot. The term may first have appeared in the legal literature with Carlston (1956), but as "transnational" was already a familiar and appropriate adjective in use, I have no reason to think that others were following him. I conclude that no particular person should be credited with the use of "transnational corporation," positive, negative, or neutral. I would, as always, welcome views and information from others on this.

Variable geometry
This term is a bit hard to track, as it seems to have many uses outside of economics, particularly within the engineering and design of machines. In order to limit a search to use of the term within the European Union, I have searched for "variable geometry Europe." Google Scholar fails to find this before 1982, when it appeared in three sources. In all three, the term was used along with several others for the same idea, suggesting that none of them were new. For example, Emerson (1982) said
    Britain's token membership has in practice given support to the concept of two-tier Europe, two-speed Europe, variable geometry Europe -- call it what you will.
From this I gather that this and other terms had probably been circulating in discussions and perhaps negotiations of European integration for some time.

Exactly why one would speak of a "geometry," I don't know, but most likely it was prompted by the different shapes that maps of included countries would take if different countries participated in different agreements.

Vent for surplus
The "vent for surplus" theory of trade was developed especially by Myint (1958), who attributed the term to Williams (1929) who had taken it from Mill (1848). Myint attributed the idea to Smith (1776).

The basis for giving Smith (1776) credit (or blame) for the idea is the following passage, p. 240-1:

    Between whatever places foreign trade is carried on, they all of them derive two distinct benefits from it. It carries out that surplus part of the produce of their land and labour for which there is no demand among them, and brings back in return for it something else for which there is a demand. It gives a value to their superfluities, by exchanging them for something else, which may satisfy a part of their wants, and increase their enjoyments.

Mill (1848, p. 579) was critical of this idea, which he viewed as a mercantilist mis-conception:

    An extended market for its produce--an abundant consumption for its goods--a vent for its surplus--are the phrases by which it has been customary to designate the uses and recommendations of commerce with foreign countries. This notion is intelligible, when we consider that the authors and leaders of opinion on mercantile questions have always hitherto been the selling class. It is in truth a surviving relic of the Mercantile Theory....
It seems to have been this passage, with its "vent for its surplus," that introduced the vent for surplus terminology, although Mill himself calls it "customary." My Google-Scholar search for the term has not found anything earlier.

Both the terminology and the criticism also appear in Mill (1874), in a discussion of Ricardo's treatment of trade, which Mill preferred:

    Previously to his [Ricardo's] time, the benefits of foreign trade were deemed, even by the most philosophical enquirers, to consist in affording a vent for surplus produce, or in enabling a portion of the national capital to replace itself with a profit. The futility of the theory implied in these and similar phrases, was an obvious consequence from the speculations of writers even anterior to Mr. Ricardo.
Although published later, Mill's preface to this volume says that the essay had been written much earlier, in 1829 and 1830. Thus the vent for surplus term seems to date from then. Although Myint has usually been cited for the term, it has most frequently been referred to as "Adam Smith's vent for surplus theory."

Water in the tariff

There are three distinct uses of the term "water in the tariff," the origins of which I will explore in a moment. But first, let me explain and illustrate how they differ in practice. The figure below shows, to the right of the vertical axis, the market for an import into a small country facing a given world price for an imported good and applying a specific tariff either to all of those imports or to only those imports beyond the quota of a tariff rate quota. The portion of the figure to the left of the vertical axis shows the amount of water in the tariff under each of the three uses of the term, as a function of the size of the tariff measured as the excess of the price above the world price.

Definition #1, tariff redundancy starts only when the tariff-plus-world-price exceeds the autarky price and then rises one-to-one with the tariff along a 45 degree line. Definition #2 assumes the presence of a tariff rate quota as part of dirty tariffication. Here, water in the tariff starts when the out-of-quota tariff exceeds the tariff equivalent of the quota, and then rises with the tariff along another 45 degree line. Finally, definition #3, tariff onverhang is very different. It measures the extent to which the tariff is below, not above, a critical valute -- the country's tariff binding. This, therefore rises as the tariff falls below that binding, along another 45 degree line but angling down, not up, as we move left.

Tariff Redundancy

The first use that I've found of "water in the tariff" in any sense was in Corden (1966, p. 236), where he said

    As is well known, many tariff structures have redundant elements in them ("water in the tariff"), and it is these elements which trade negotiators are usually most ready to sacrifice."
This clearly refers to my definition #1, "The extent to which a tariff is higher than necessary to be prohibitive," since a portion of that tariff could be eliminated without any effect on trade or anything else. I cannot know whether Corden coined the term himself or had heard it used by others, and I'm sorry that I only got to considering this a few months after Corden himself passed away, as I might have asked him.

Exactly why he or someone else chose this term I also do not know, but I presume it was related to the idea that certain things, such as drinks, can be "watered down" by adding water that increases their volume but not their effects.

The possibility that water in the tariff might mean that a change in the tariff has no effect on trade, as is the case if it is more than prohibitive, might also suggest that water in the tariff would describe a tariff that accompanies an import quota if the tariff is smaller than the quota's tariff equivalent. In that case, a change in the tariff also does not change trade, although it does change the size of the quota rents.

Dirty Tariffication

However, among the uses of the term "water in the tariff" that I have found, I only find what might be called the opposite of this: my definition #2: a tariff that is set larger than the tariff equivalent of an NTB after a process of tariffication. If such a tariff were actually to replace the NTB, then of course it very much would matter for the volume of trade, and it would eliminate trade if were prohibitive.

But in practice, tariffication seems more often to mean replacing NTBs with a tariff rate quota, in what has been called dirty tariffication, with a low or zero tariff inside the quota and a high tariff for imports beyond the quota. If that larger tariff is larger than the tariff equivalent of the quota, then that excess is said to be water in the tariff. Of course if the tariff is large enough, then it will also be large enough to have cut off all trade, had there not been a lower tariff on in-quota imports.

The first two uses of the term in something like this sense were both in 1999, but they seem to fit better with definitions #1 and #3 than #2. Langhammer (1999, p. 15) says

    ... many tariff equivalents in industrial economies are redundant ("water in the tariff" or so-called dirty tariffication): the equivalents are higher than differences between domestic and world market prices ...
Paarlberg (1999, p.1) says
    ...nations could determine tariff equivalents much greater than the actual barriers imposed. This is called "dirty tariffication" or putting "water in the tariff."
However, he goes on to say "Countries with 'water in their tariff' can, should they choose to, raise the tariff and still satisfy their WTO commitments." This suggests definition #3, although without explicitly mentioning tariff bindings. Annd neither of these authors mentions the tariff being part of a tariff rate quota.

The clearest statement I've found of my definition #2 is in Boughner et al. (2000), p. 59):

    Dirty tariffication mitigates trade liberalization effects of TRQs for given tariff reductions because most second-tier tariffs are redundant, resulting in what is known as water in the tariff.
At least two other sources in 2000 use the term in what I think is probably this sense, although less clearly. Just how it happened that this new meaning for the term appeared, I don't know, but it seems to have occurred around 1999 or 2000. Though distinct from definition #1, the logic behind it is very similar.

Tariff Overhang

The first clear statements of my definition #3 are in several publications in 2000, the first apparently being Matthews (2000, p. 23), as it was dated January. Speaking of the possibility of resetting tariff bindings to equal currently applied rates, he says

    This would eliminate the gap between the bound and the applied rates, the so-called discretionary protection or water in the tariff.
However, several other authors also used the term this way in 2000:
    Mattoo and Subramanian (2000, p. 6): India availed itself of large amounts of flexibility in the form of the wedge between the bound tariff and the actual tariff, particularly in agriculture. In 1996 and 1997, the government, in the face of fiscal pressures, decided to raise tariffs and use up some of the water in the tariff.

    Sauvé and Gillespie (2000, p. 433): ... "water" in the tariff schedules -- a legally bound rate of protection that is higher than the rate actually applied ...

    McIntyre (2000, p. 88): ... the applied rate of import duty is below that of the WTO binding. ... This is the so-called "policy water" in the tariff ....

This use of the term had clearly caught on in 2000 and perhaps before. It is sufficiently different from the other two uses that I view it as rather unfortunate. A better term might have been "water in the tariff binding," since it is the binding, not the tariff itself, that is excessive.