The Neofactor Proportions Theories

The consternation caused by the Leontief paradox led immediately to attempts at finding what the methodologists would call ‘immunising stratagems’. As the reader knows, the first ‘immunising stratagem’ was put forward by Leontief himself when he suggested that American labour was relatively more productive than foreign labour by a factor of three. Leontief’s disconcerting empirical findings also led to a search for sophisticated interpretations and to various attempts at providing alternative or additional explanations. In terms of Lakatos’s MSRP, as the reader may recall,1the ‘hard core’ of the HOS model is surrounded by a ‘protective belt’ of auxiliary hypotheses from which new explanations emerge.