Timoshenko, Vladimir

Timoshenko, Vladimir [Тимошенко, Володимир; Tymošenko, Volodymyr], b 25 April 1885 in Bazylivka, Konotop county, Chernihiv gubernia, d 15 August 1965 in Menlo Park, California, USA. Economist and economic historian; member of the American Economic Association, the Royal Economic Society, the Shevchenko Scientific Society, and the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences; brother of Stephen Timoshenko and Serhii Tymoshenko. After graduating from the Saint Petersburg Polytechnical Institute (1911) he worked in the economics department of the imperial ministries of Railroads, Agriculture, and Commerce and Industry. In December 1917 he returned to Ukraine and became a consultant to the Ministry of Finance of the Ukrainian National Republic and director of the Institute of Economic Conjuncture at the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. In 1919 he was appointed economic adviser to the Ukrainian delegation to the Paris Peace Conference. In that capacity he prepared several memorandums on the Ukrainian economy and Ukrainian economic relations with Russia and France, which were published in French and English.

After the fall of the Ukrainian National Republic he remained in the West. He taught economic geography at the Ukrainian Free University and the Ukrainian Husbandry Academy in Poděbrady and published the textbooks Vstup do vchennia pro svitovyi rynok (An Introduction to the Study on the World Market, 1923) and Vchennia pro svitove hospodarstvo (Study on the World Economy, 1923). In 1925 he won a Rockefeller Fellowship to continue his studies in the United States. After completing his PH D at Cornell University in 1927, he taught economics there and at the University of Michigan (1928–34). He was the senior agricultural economist at the US Department of Agriculture in Washington, DC in 1934–6 and then a professor at Stanford University (1936–50).

Most of Timoshenko’s published works dealt with agricultural economics, international trade, Soviet agriculture, and the theory and function of markets. His English-language monographs include The Role of Agricultural Fluctuations in the Business Cycle (1930), Agricultural Russia and the Wheat Problem (1932; repr 1972), The Soviet Sugar Industry and Its Postwar Restoration (1951), and The World’s Sugar: Progress and Policy (1957, with B. Swerling). He also published some articles on subjects such as the Ukrainian economy and on the theories of Mykhailo Tuhan-Baranovsky.

Bohdan Wynar

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 5 (1993).]