"It is a rare treat to read the reminiscences of [this] group of development economists....We can be grateful to the World Bank for bringing these intellectual giants together to present their retrospective views..."--Choice The pioneers in development economics--Lord Bauer, Colin Clark, Albert O. Hirschman, Sir Arthur Lewis, Gunnar Myrdal Raul Prebisch, Paul N. Rosenstein-Rodan, W.W. Rostow, H.W. Singer, and Jan Tinbergen--offer a retrospective view of the formative decade after World War II when they made their seminal contributions to the subject. In individual papers, the pioneers recapture the intellectual excitement, expectations, and activism of that period and provide rare autobiographical detail and insight into why they said what they did and what they now think about the state of development thought and policy. Commentary is provided by economists of the succeeding generation, who reappraise their ideas with the benefit of hindsight. General overviews of the subject have been written by Gerald M. Meier and Paul Streeten.
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The book is a product of the IBRD - the World Bank. I highly recommend this publication as a laudable piece of development economics history, as the world existed prior to the dramatic rearrangement of national and international economies occurring in 1989. I first acquired this book in the early 1990s while taking a Master of Arts degree in Development Banking at the American University in Washington, D.C., then subsequently working as a consultant for the Bank. It comes with the territory, so to speak, that anyone who "practiced" development economics also became its historian, whether anecdotally or scientifically. From that historical penchant, "Pioneers in Development" has a very honored place in my library. Those familiar with World Bank research and publishing may recognize that over the years, the Bank has consistently quoted itself; to wit, "we believe this or that approach to poverty alleviation or capital investment, et al., is the first best choice because we said so in our other publications..." And so, it is wonderful to see the plethora of non-Bank references deployed in "Pioneers in Development." The book has another feature which makes it personally significant - the biographies which comprise the framework of this history book begin with Lord Peter Bauer, whose experience with the contest between external institutional interventions, versus self-determination, were often at odds with the Bank's world views. In any event, this is a very important work of history.