Pioneers in development / edtied by Gerald M. Meier and Dudly Seers c.1

IT IS A RARE OCCASION when the pioneers of a subject can be called back to reflect on why they said what they did some thirty or forty years ago-and to assess their earlier thoughts in light of the subsequent evolution of the subject they helped to establish. Such is the occasion of this book.

In the late 1940s and 1950s, several seminal works in development economics appeared as the countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. attempted to emerge from their pervasive and persistent poverty. The impulse behind this book is the desire to recapture the spirit and the economic thought of that pioneering period..

To do this, ten pioneers were invited by the World Bank to prepare the essays that appear in this book-Lord Bauer, Colin Clark, Albert O. Hirschman, Nobel laureate Sir Arthur Lewis, Nobel laureate Gunnar Myrdal, Raúl Prebisch, Paul N. Rosenstein-Rodan, Walt W. Rostow, Hans W. Singer, and Nobel laureate Jan Tinbergen.

When the Second World War ended, economists were challenged by the urgent problems of development. During the next decade a few central articles, official reports, and books came to dominate the thinking about development. The authors of these studies were the pioneers who initially shaped the subject by introducing concepts, deducing principles, and modeling the process of development. Some of the pioneers were stimu lated to analyze development problems by their previous academic in terests, some by their experience in related policymaking activities, some out of idealism, and others by a basic intellectual curiosity..

In this book, the pioneers have been asked to reassess the main themes of their early work and to reconsider their assumptions, concepts, and policy prescriptions in relation to the way the course of development has pro ceeded since their pioneering days.

In their individual papers, they now recapture the intellectual excite ment, expectations, and activism of that unique pioneering period. Not only do their papers display autobiographical charm but, taken as a set, they also offer an unusual opportunity for a retrospective view of what has happened to development economics. And the retrospective view natu rally has implications for future directions of the subject.The pioneers initially prepared their papers for lectures presented at the World Bank. Following each public lecture, a small seminar was arranged with commentators offering a critique. A number of contemporary de velopment economists served as commentators: Dragoslav Avramovic, Bela Balassa, Jagdish Bhagwati, Michael Bruno, Carlos Diaz-Alejandro, Albert Fishlow, Arnold Harberger, Gerald Helleiner, Michael Lipton, Azizali F. Mohammed, Hla Myint, Graham Pyatt, T. N. Srinivasan, and Paul Streeten.

This book presents the papers of the pioneers, together with the com ments. An introductory historical chapter sets the stage, outlining some of the intellectual trends and institutional features that shaped the political and economic environment of the formative period for the pioneers. The final survey chapter synthesizes various issues in development thought and points toward the resolution of unsettled questions in the subject.

The selection of the pioneers was necessarily limited in number. Some pioneers declined the invitation, others were believed to be better placed on a list for a successor volume covering the 1960s. And some pioneers are deceased: references to their works are made in both the introductory and closing chapters.