The Economics of Under-Developed Countries

PERHAPS never in the history of economic thought, and certainly not since the crash of 1929; has economic analysis lagged so far behind the demands of policy as it does at present. elevation of economic development to the top ranks of policy issues, in under-developed and advanced countries alike, has caught professional economists more than ever unprepared to deal with the most pressing economic problem of the moment. One result of this unusually large inflationary gap between the demand for solid policy recommendations and the supply of them has been an unprecedented concentration of economists' effort on the study of economic growth. technical assistance programmes under the United Nations, the International Cooperation Administration, the Colombo Plan, other bilateral programmes, and the Ford Foundation have given economists opportunities for laboratory on a scale never before open to them. In the universities, too, more and more economists have redirected their interests in research towards economic development. Another result of the new interest in development has been a demand from students and the general public for enlightenment on problems of economic development. Accordingly, the last two or three years have brought forth a sudden spate of on the subject. Despite a decade of concentration, a break-through in the general theory of development which would do for that field what the General Theory of Keynes did in the field of income and employment, or what the work of Joan Robinson and Chamberlin did for the theory of the firm, has yet to come. And genuine textbooks can be written only some years after such a break-through, when the dust that it has raised has begun to settle. two books here under review are good examples of the current state of the economics of under-developed countries. One of them consists of three lectures delivered by Peter Bauer to the Commonwealth Studies-Center of Duke University. These lectures were not aimed at an audience of professional economists, and a minimum of technical jargon is used. But as Professor Spengler says in his Foreword, The language of these lectures is exact, terse, and deceptively simple. other book, by Bauer and Yamey, is the most recent of the Cambridge Economic Handbooks. This series was intended to convey to the ordinary reader and to the uninitiated student some conception