Topic: What contribution did Adam Smith and John M. Keynes make to the study of economics? Adam Smith was the founder of economics, as we know it today. His thoughts have shaped modern ideas about the market economy and the role of the state in relation to it. Smith laid the intellectual framework that explained the free market (which still holds true today) and laissez-faire. Both are connected with the underlying theme of economic growth. …showed first 75 words of 1267 total…

…showed last 75 words of 1267 total…returned to the classical analysis. Keynes turned his thoughts to the design of international financial institutions calculated to limit the spread of depression. At the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944 he played a prominent part. But the institutions that resulted from the conference, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank--two agencies that survive into the 1980s--bear much stronger marks of the orthodox theories of the United States Treasury of that time than of Keynes's thinking.