Writing the History of Development Economics

Abstract

What Is Development Economics?This question, apparently unproblematic, has been at the center of the development discourse for decades now.Indeed, the first major debate that shaped the discipline-the 1950s balanced-growth versus unbalanced-growth debate-was fought under the rubric of what actually defined development economics as a distinct disciplinary field.Albert Hirschman (1958, 51) famously criticized the theory of balanced growth, whose principal authors he identified in Paul Rosenstein-Rodan, Ragnar Nurkse, and Tibor Scitovsky, on the ground that the theory failed "as a theory of development."As Hirschman put it, Development presumably means the process of change of one type of economy into some other more advanced type.But such a process is given up as hopeless by the balanced growth theory which finds it difficult to visualize how the "underdevelopment" equilibrium can be broken into at any point. . . .The balanced growth theory reaches the conclusion that an entirely new, self-contained modern industrial economy must be superimposed on the stagnant and equally self-contained traditional sector. . . .This is not growth, it is not even the grafting of something new onto something old; it is a perfectly dualistic pattern of development.(51)(52)

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 30 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.