The Fall and Rise of Development Economics

Abstract

works is very limited. In essence, the Hirschman I know is the author of The Strategy of Economic Development and little else. So I am in no position to write about his larger vision. Furthermore, while I am a great admirer of The Strategy of Economic Development, I do not think that it was helpful to development economics. That may sound paradoxical, but I'll try to explain what I mean as I go along. To put it briefly, however, I regard the intellectual strategy that Hirschman adopted in writing that book as an understandable but wrong response to what had become a crisis in the field of economic development. Perversely, the very brilliance and persuasiveness of the book made it all the more destructive. If this paper is not about Hirschman, what is it about? It is some reflections on two intertwined themes. One is the strange history of development economics, or more specifically the linked set of ideas that I have elsewhere (Krugman 1993) called "high development theory". This set of ideas was and is highly persuasive as at least a partial explanation of what development is about, and for a stretch of about 15 years in the 1940s and 1950s it was deeply influential among both economists and policymakers. Yet in the late 1950s high development theory rapidly unravelled, to the point where by the time I studied

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