Gertrude Lovasy

Gertrude Lovasy was born on 17 December 1900 in Vienna, the daughter of Josef Friedrich Lovasy, into a Jewish family, and grew up in Baden near Vienna. Like all Austrians, she lost the nobiliary particle "von" in 1919 with the abolition of formal aristocratic privileges. She attended the secondary school (Realgymnasium) in Baden and from April 1924 studied at the Faculty of Law and Political Science of the University of Vienna. On 18 December 1928 she defended her dissertation "Die rechtliche Stellung der Kartelle unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der österreichischen Eisenindustrie" (The Legal Status of Cartels, with Particular Reference to the Austrian Iron Industry). Her official doctoral supervisor was Hans Mayer; in parallel she attended Ludwig von Mises's private seminar and thus belonged to that small circle of women who shaped the Austrian School and the Mises circle in the 1920s and 1930s. In Vienna, Lovasy worked as an economist for the Austrian steel cartel and at the Vienna Institute for Business Cycle Research, which Hayek and Mises had founded in 1927. Her direct superior there was Oskar Morgenstern. During this period she published two essays in the "Zeitschrift für Nationalökonomie" (Journal of Economics), among them "Schutzzölle bei unvollkommener Konkurrenz" (Protective Tariffs under Imperfect Competition) (1934), an early application of the theory of imperfect competition to questions of foreign-trade policy. After the Anschluss she lost her position on racial grounds in 1938. Her emigration was delayed because she had to arrange care for her elderly mother. Alfred Stonier looked after the mother (who later reached England), Gerhard Tintner put her in touch with Jakob Marschak, and Gottfried Haberler supplied the affidavit for the US visa. Friedrich August von Hayek did not take part. In 1939 Lovasy reached the United States via France and Great Britain. In Princeton she worked again with Morgenstern until 1942, this time on his economic history of Austria in the interwar period. From 1944 she was an analyst in Washington at the US State Department, then at the Economic and Financial Department of the United Nations, where she wrote the memorandum "International Cartels" (circulated in 1945, printed in 1947). In 1947 she moved to the newly founded International Monetary Fund. There she rose from staff economist in the Special Studies Division to deputy division chief and finally to adviser in the Research and Statistics Department. Her fields of specialization were foreign trade, commodity markets, and price stabilization. In 1963 she played a leading part in creating the Compensatory Financing Facility, an IMF instrument for smoothing commodity-price shocks for developing countries, and she contributed to the International Coffee Agreements. After her retirement in 1965 she advised the Organization of American States for a time. She died on 9 January 1974 and was buried in Washington National Cemetery.