Adam Smith and Modern Economics: From Market Behaviour to Public Choice

Adam Smith and Modern Economics provides a lively introduction to some of the very latest economic concepts and debates reinterpreted from the work of the ‘father of economics’. Professor West demonstrates the continuing relevance of his work, two centuries after his death, with special emphasis on the inspiration he has given to economic research during the last two decades. Most notable has been the focus in the 1980s on refutable hypotheses in Smith's writing and the work of testing them with systematic data that were not available in his time. It is shown that even Smith’s central invisible hand theorem is now being translated into a set of falsifiable predictions and that these have withstood important empirical tests in the late 1980s.The book makes an important contribution by demonstrating the continuing relevance of Smith's work to economics in the late 20th century.