Michio Morishima (1923-2004) is an internationally renowned Japanese mathematical economist, although his base was the London School of Economics (LSE) in England rather than Japan for a long time.

He was born in 1923 in Japan, and entered Kyoto Imperial University (currently Kyoto University) as a student in the midst of World War II (1942). In Kyoto, he studied sociology under the guidance of the distinguished sociologist Yasuma Takata and studied Western mainstream economic theory (in particular, Hicks’s 1939 Value and Capital) under the guidance of Hideo Aoyama.

After World War II, he taught economic theory at Kyoto University and Osaka University in Japan. In 1969, he shifted his base from Japan to England, and taught economic theory at the University of Essex. He was a professor of economic theory at the LSE from 1970 to 1988. He contributed to the establishment of the Suntry and Toyota International Centre for Economic and Related Disciplines (STICERD) at the LSE and became the first chairman of STICERD. After retiring from the LSE, he taught economics at the University of Siena, Italy. He became the first Japanese economist to undertake the role of the president of the Econometric Society in 1965 when he was a professor at Osaka University. (Later two Japanese economists, Hirofumi Uzawa and Takashi Negishi, followed him to become the president of the Econometric Society.)

He has published numerous creative papers on mathematical economic theory both in Japanese and in English since the 1950s. In particular, he contributed in the field of nonlinear macrodynamic theories of economic fluctuations in the 1950s, and multisectoral dynamic theories of economic growth in the 1960s. His first book entitled Dogakuteki KeizaiRiron (Dynamic Economic Theory) was published in Japanese by Kobundo, Tokyo in 1950, and a revised version of this book was published in English 46 years later (Morishima 1996). In this book he studied stability, instability, and cyclical fluctuations of dynamic general equilibrium system by means of linear and nonlinear differential equations, and his theoretical achievements surpassed those of J.R.

Hicks, P.A. Samuelson and O. Lange at that time. On the basis of these theoretical achievements, he contributed to the development of multisectoral theories of economic growth which were originated in the seminal work by von Neumann (Morishima 1964, 1969). In the 1970s and the 1980s, he published a series of works which tackled the economic theories of the past great economists such as Marx, Walras and Ricardo from the point of view of modern mathematical economics (Morishima 1973, 1977, 1989; see also Kurz 2011). From the 1980s to the 2000s, he published a series of socio-economic essays on the Japanese society (Morishima 1982, 2000).

Although his socio-economic essays on Japan during the 1980s to 2000s contributed to his success in getting popularity among the non-academic world, his main contribution in economics is the development of the mathematically rigorous dynamic economic theory. As already noted, Morishima (1950) is the starting point of his research of dynamic economic theory, and it was already a highly creative contribution to economic theory. After the publication of this book, he wrote a series of original papers on the nonlinear macrodynamic theory of the business cycles at almost the same period as Goodwin’s contribution appeared (Morishima 1953, 1958). His contribution together with contributions by Yasui and Ichimura in this period was referred to as “Japanese contributions to nonlinear cycle theory” by Velupillai (2008).

His main contribution in the 1960s is the mathematical studies of the multisectoral

models of economic growth that was inspired by von Neumann’s model of general economic equilibrium in a growing economy (Morishima 1964, 1969). His contribution in this period was much influenced by Hicks’s (1965) study. Morishima’s study of the capital theory in the 1990s is also based on the multisectoral dynamic models a la von Neumann (Morishima 1992). Even his highly original studies of the past great economists by means of rigorous mathematical method in the 1970s and the 1980s are based on von Neumann type multisectoral models (Morishima 1973, 1977, 1989).

It was already noted that Morishima contributed to the mathematical formulation of Marxian economic theory in the 1970s (see Morishima 1973). It is also worth noting, however, that his contribution of mathematical Marxian economics was influenced by the contributions by another pioneering Japanese mathematical Marxian economist, Nobuo Okishio (see Okishio 1963, 1993).

In the 1990s, Morishima challenged the new approach to synthesize the growth theory and the monetary theory based on the analytical framework of von Neumann’s multisectoral model (see Morishima 1992), which became his last major contribution to economic theory.

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Michio Morishima (1923-2004) is an internationally renowned Japanese mathematical economist, although his base was the London School of Economics (LSE) in England rather than Japan for a long time.

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