Título en español.

Abstract

Leopold Kohr (1909-1994) was a professor at the Department of Economics –Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Puerto Rico´s Rio Piedras campus–, from 1955 to 1973. His intellectual contributions were always focused on a philosophy regarding size in which, together with a severe criticism toward gigantism, the emphasis was placed on the possibilities of political units of moderate scale. In this article, Professor Kohr´s hardly conventional ideas are linked with recent contributions made in the field of the economy of small countries. Emphasis is placed on the fact that institutional and technological changes force the reconceptualization of economic size. This provides the framework to look at the Puerto Rican experience from an institutional perspective, an experience which is characterized in this article as one in which economic growth has resulted in hypertrophy.