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A brief note on the decline and rise of development economics
Ghosh, Jayati
Ghosh, Jayati
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"Economics as a discipline has always been concerned with development. The early economists, from the Physiocrats through Smith and Ricardo to Marx, were essentially concerned with understanding the processes of economic growth and structural change : how and why they occurred, what forms they took, what prevented or constrained them, and to what extent they actually led to greater material prosperity and more general human progress. And it was this broader set of "macro" questions which in turn defined both their focus and their approach to more specific issues relating to the functioning of capitalist economies. It is true that the marginalist revolution of the late 19th century led economists away from these larger evolutionary questions towards particularist investigations into the current, sans history. Nevertheless it might be fair to say that trying to understand the processes of growth and development have remained the basic motivating forces for the study of economics. To that extent, it would be misleading to treat it even as a branch of the subject, since the questions raised touch at the core of the discipline itself. But of course, what is now generally thought of as development economics has a much more recent lineage, and is typically traced to the second half of the twentieth century, indeed, to the immediate postwar period of the 1950s and 1960s when there was a flowering of economic literature relating to both development and underdevelopment. While some of this became the basis for subsequent "structuralist" analysis, much of the standard literature of that time was still very much within the mainstream of the discipline, and retained the fundamentals of the mainstream approach even while altering some of the assumptions. Thus, the economic dualism depicted by Arthur Lewis, the co-ordination failures inherent in less developed economies described by Rosenstein-Rodan, the efficacy of unbalanced "big push" strategies for industrialisation advocated by Albert Hirschman, all in a sense dealt with development policy as a response to the market failures which were specific to latecomers."(pg 2)
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2001-09-07
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With permission of the license/copyright holder