For his 100th anniversary on 5 October 2007, the Estonian Postal Service commemorated Nurkse with an international letter stamp. A large stone monument with a plaque will also be unveiled across the house he was born in Käru. He was also honored earlier in 2007 by the inauguration of a Lecture Series by the Bank of Estonia and an international conference by Tallinn University of Technology's Technology Governance program. An economics professorship at Columbia is named in his honor. Nurkse is one of the founding fathers of Classical Development Economics. Together with Rosenstein-Rodan and Mandelbaum, he promoted a 'theory of the big push', emphasized the role of savings and capital formation in economic development, and argued that poor nations remained poor because of a 'vicious circle of poverty'. Among his major works are "International Currency Experience: Lessons of the Interwar Period" (1944), the foundation of the Bretton Woods Agreement, "Conditions of International Monetary Equilibrium" (1945), and "Problems of Capital Formation in Underdeveloped Countries" (1953). Ragnar Nurkse married Harriet Berger of Englewood, New Jersey, in 1946, and they had two sons. One of them is the poet Dennis Nurkse.