He served briefly as Minister of Commerce and Industry from 1944 to 1945 in the Swedish coalition government during World War II.

Bertil Ohlin was raised in Klippan, Scania with seven siblings, where his father Elis was a civil servant and bailiff.

His mother Ingeborg influenced him with her left-liberal views on the society, with Nordic partnership and Karl Staaff as her role model.

In 1929, he debated with John Maynard Keynes and contradicted the latter's view on the consequences of the heavy war reparations payments imposed on Germany.

(Keynes predicted a war caused by the burden of debt, but Ohlin thought that Germany could afford the reparations.)

[citation needed] In 1937, Ohlin spent half a year at the University of California, Berkeley, as a visiting professor.

The model provided a basis for later work on the effects of protection on real wages, and has been fruitful in producing predictions and analysis; Ohlin himself used the model to derive the Heckscher–Ohlin theorem, which predicts that capital-abundant countries export capital-intensive goods, while labor-abundant countries export the labor-intensive goods.

In countries with an abundance of capital, wage rates tend to be high; therefore, labor-intensive products, e.g. textiles, simple electronics, etc., are more costly to produce internally.