Introduction

• Published date: 01 March 2021
• Author: Kazuo Nishimura,Sugata Marjit,Fumio Dei,Makoto Yano
• Date: 01 March 2021
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ijet.12290

Int J Econ Theory. 2021;17:3–5. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/ijet © 2020 IAET

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DOI: 10.1111/ijet.12290

Introduction

Introduction

Fumio Dei |Sugata Marjit |Kazuo Nishimura |Makoto Yano

This special issue on general equilibrium and trade celebrates outstanding research contribu-

tions of Ronald Jones spanning more than five decades. It contains papers written by his

students, grand‐students, friends, and colleagues who follow the Jonesian tradition of research

at the frontier of knowledge.

Considered as one of the father figures of modern trade theory, Ron Jones's early training in

the 1950s was under both Stolper at Swarthmore as an undergraduate and Samuelson at MIT

from where he received his PhD in 1956. Since 1958 he has been at the University of Rochester,

and for many years he held the Xerox Chair Professorship in the department. He has received

numerous awards, including nomination as a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic

Association and membership of the National Academy of Science among many others. In spite

of lucrative offers from top institutions, he has never left Rochester. Along with Lionel

McKenzie he was instrumental in building up the department and its reputation as a top‐tier

school.

The hallmark of Jones's contribution are his razor‐sharp, elegant yet simple expositions of

complex problems. His favorite quote for his students is “Can you convince the janitor?”It is no

wonder that his thesis supervisor and mentor, Robert Solow, once hailed his path‐breaking 1965

Journal of Political Economy paper on simple general equilibrium models (Jones, 1965) with the

comment that “it is an absolute miracle of clarity and to‐the‐point‐ness”and proposed it as

necessary reading for all graduate students in economics (Solow's quote with the letter has been

published in Marjit and Kar, 2018). It is very difficult to do justice to all his contributions in the

limited space we have. Moreover, earlier volumes published in his honor contain introductions

to his contributions. But since those volumes were published he has produced much more

work, making another celebration quite timely.

Beyond his famous 1965 piece (Jones, 1965) on which James Markusen writes excellently in

this issue, drawing its lessons for the applied general equilibrium models used extensively in

policy analyses, his 1971 paper on the specific factor model (Jones, 1971) has been an in-

tellectual pillar in the profession, influencing, both across space and time, hosts of researchers

working on trade, development, public finance, economic history, and so on. For example, with

one of his students and one of the editors of this issue, Fumio Dei, he wrote a related paper, a

very thoughtful and interesting piece on foreign investment (Jones and Dei, 1983).

In 1994 the University of Michigan published an anthology of the most significant papers on

Stolper and Samuelson's result to celebrate 50 years since its publication which highlighted

Jones's three‐page paper with his student Sugata Marjit, also an editor of this issue, that

provides the first sufficient condition for the N×Ncase in terms of a simple production

structure (Jones and Marjit, 1985). Eventually that work was extended to generate an