Strategy of international development : essays in the economics of backwardness / edited by Cairncross, Sir Alec and

There can be few more indefatigable contributors to the literature on economic backwardness than Hans Singer. For the past twenty-five years his books, papers, articles, reviews and reports have poured out in an extraordinary variety of publications. Even since he left the United Nations Secretariat in 1969 he has sub mitted a score of reports, usually in collaboration with others, to international bodies and governments. A full bibliography of his writings would run to hundreds of items.

Most of this has been done in the middle of a busy official life, interrupted by frequent journeys half across the world. There is practically no country that he has not visited, and there are few that he has not advised. He must have addressed a wider variety of audiences in a wider assortment of places about a wider range of subjects than any economist (living or dead). He has moved from continent to continent, expounding, advocating, and devis ing strategies of economic development. His influence has been felt quite as much by word of mouth in the succession of countries where he has lectured as through the pile of working documents and published papers that survive like a spoor from his travels.

The very facility of his writing has irked some economists, one of whom described him unkindly almost thirty years ago as 'the Edgar Wallace of modern economics'. But the profusion of papers is balanced by an equal fertility of ideas. Hans Singer keeps popping up with some fresh comment or proposal. He is never content to take a negative approach and underline what should not be attempted, but is essentially an economic activist, always on the look-out for what might be done and concerned to mobilize support for whatever seems most hopeful. His intellectual energy and versatility are indeed remarkable.