Dissemination and reception overseas
The most prominent overseas influence of German economics was probably in the United States. This was due to the fact that before American universities developed their own PhD programs in the late ninteenth century, it was very common for aspiring American academics to complete PhDs in Germany.
Before the First World War many of the leading economists in the United States had studied in Germany, including John B. Clark, Richard T. Ely, Arthur T. Hadley, Simon S. Patten, E.R.A. Seligman, and Frank Taussig. That influence made itself felt less in the development of historical and institutional approaches to economics (though that was one observable trend), but more in the organization of the discipline around the American Economic Association (founded by Richard T. Ely in 1885), which was consciously modeled on the German Verein fur Socialpolitik.Likewise, the development of academic journals with peer review (American Economic Review, founded 1911), the seminar system of education at the graduate level, the insistence on original research in graduate training, and the founding of public and private economic research institutes like the Bureau of Labor Statistics (1884) and National Bureau of Economic Research (1920) were all unmistakably German features of American higher education in economics and economic research that continue to this day. This does not begin to exhaust the many other lines of contact that linked German economics with the emergence of newer disciplines like Business Administration, Sociology, Social Work and Public Administration in the United States, or the many reform initiatives of the Progressive Movement which involved American economists either trained or strongly influenced by German economic thought. Later in the mid twentieth century, the German economics of space and location theory would have an impact on the development and formalization of economic geography and regional science in the United States, such as in the work of Walter Isard.
It is perhaps less widely known that a parallel transfer of German ideas and institutions occurred in Meiji-era Japan, where German teachers and government advisers were active. Those who took up the study of economics in Germany in the Meiji era included Wadagaki Kenzo, Kanai Noburu, Kuwata Kumazo, Takano Iwasaburo, Seki Hajime, Fukuda Tokuzo, and Kawakami Hajime. It was this first cohort of Japanese students in Germany, and particularly Kanai, who introduced the term shakaimondai (from German soziale frage, “social question”) to Japan through a number of publications, Shakaimondai (1892) among them. Kanai, Kuwata, Fukuda, and others would also form the Nihon shakaisei sakugakkai (Japanese Social Policy Association) in 1896, modeled on the German Verein fur Socialpolitik. The range ofJapanese scholarship influenced by German training in economics was wide and spanned the political spectrum, including the trade unionism and social democracy of Takano, the revisionist Marxism of Kawakami, and Takano and Kawakami’s extensive early involvement with the Ohara Institute in systematic collection of social statistics. As in the United States, many German-trained Japanese economists were active as social reformers.