DPU Working Paper - No. 119

Author: Cesar Gallo

Publication Date: 2002

All sciences should be aimed at providing humanity with a better quality of life. The classical economists were concerned with this objective of Economics as a science. According to Adam Smith (1884), no society can be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.

David Ricardo placed the distribution of income at the centre of his thought when he stated that Political Economy should be aimed at determining the laws that rule the distribution of income (Bigsten, 1983; Ferrán, 1997, Atkinson, 1997). Hartwell (1972) goes further in arguing that “Economics is, in essence, the study of poverty” (p. 3). 

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