Schmidt's Betriebswirtschaft Theory

Abstract

Those only speking English are confronted with considerable confusion regarding the precise nature of Fritz Schmidt's contribution to the German Betriebswirschaft (business economics) movement during the 1920s. The similarity between his theory and the Bedrijfseconomie theory attributed to Theodore Limperg has also been less than clear. The primary cause is that their repective works have not been translated from the original German and Dutch and published in English. This paper draws upon translations to illustrate the substantial similarity between the accounting content of Schmidt's Betriebswirtschaft and that of Limperg's Bedrijfseconomie. Translatio of the 1951 biography of Schmidt by his student and then colleague, publications are contained in Appendix B. Contrary to some perceptions of Schmidt's work, he did address the general price level problem in his theory. And contrary to Limperg's criticism that Schmidt's mechanism for adiusting accounts for prifce and brice level changes was‘incident specific’, it was an integral part of a theory of business economics which appears to have been at least as comprehensive as Limperg's theory of Bedrijfseconomie.