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My Journey Through the History of Development Economics

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My Journey Through the History of Development Economics A Service of Leibniz-Informationszentrum econstor Wirtschaft Leibniz Information Centre Make Your Publications Visible. zbw for Economics Thorbecke, Erik Working Paper My journey through the history of development economics WIDER Working Paper, No. 2018/138 Provided in Cooperation with: United Nations University (UNU), World Institute for Development Economics Research (WIDER) Suggested Citation: Thorbecke, Erik (2018) : My journey through the history of development economics, WIDER Working Paper, No. 2018/138, ISBN 978-92-9256-580-0, The United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER), Helsinki, http://dx.doi.org/10.35188/UNU-WIDER/2018/580-0 This Version is available at: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/190185 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Terms of use: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. personal and scholarly purposes. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle You are not to copy documents for public or commercial Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich purposes, to exhibit the documents publicly, to make them machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. publicly available on the internet, or to distribute or otherwise use the documents in public. Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, If the documents have been made available under an Open gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. www.econstor.eu WIDER Working Paper 2018/138 My journey through the history of development economics Erik Thorbecke* November 2018 Abstract: This paper is essentially autobiographical and describes Erik Thorbecke’s journey through the history of development economics between the 1950s and the present. The paper consists of four parts. First, an introduction reviews briefly his professional career as a development economist and his research interactions with major contributors to the discipline. The next three parts review critically his contributions to research on and training in, respectively, (i) the ongoing process of African development; (ii) income distribution, inequality, and poverty; and (iii) economic structure, interdependence, and quantitative development analysis. Keywords: development doctrine, inequality, poverty, Africa, economic structure, Erik Thorbecke JEL classification: B31, B40, C54, O10 Acknowledgements: I would like to thank Martin Andersson, Alain de Janvry, Machiko Nissanke, and Finn Tarp, among many others, for their critical comments and useful suggestions. * H.E. Babcock Professor of Economics Emeritus, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA, email: [email protected]. This study is released in connection with the UNU-WIDER Development Conference ‘Think development—Think WIDER’, organized on 13–15 September 2018 in Helsinki, Finland. Copyright © UNU-WIDER 2018 Information and requests: [email protected] ISSN 1798-7237 ISBN 978-92-9256-580-0 Typescript prepared by Luke Finley. The United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research provides economic analysis and policy advice with the aim of promoting sustainable and equitable development. The Institute began operations in 1985 in Helsinki, Finland, as the first research and training centre of the United Nations University. Today it is a unique blend of think tank, research institute, and UN agency—providing a range of services from policy advice to governments as well as freely available original research. The Institute is funded through income from an endowment fund with additional contributions to its work programme from Finland, Sweden, and the United Kingdom as well as earmarked contributions for specific projects from a variety of donors. Katajanokanlaituri 6 B, 00160 Helsinki, Finland The views expressed in this paper are those of the author(s), and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Institute or the United Nations University, nor the programme/project donors. 1 Introduction I recently completed a ‘History of the Evolution of the Development Economics Doctrine: 1950– 2017’ (Thorbecke 2017). It occurred to me that recalling and describing my own journey through the evolution of development economics could be of some interest for the following reasons. First, my professional career, starting in the 1950s, overlapped almost completely with the period covering the lifetime of development economics. Second, I am fortunate enough to have known personally and often collaborated with giants in the field, and third, I thought that by reviewing some of my modest contributions to development economics and my interaction with some of the major contributors, I could hopefully enliven the narrative around the history of development economics through personal anecdotes. Finally, there might be some lessons (not always positive) that younger researchers might learn from my story. In this introduction, I will attempt to review, briefly and selectively, my professional career and some of the more influential interactions that I enjoyed with major contributors and innovators in the domain of development. Many of these interactions led to collaborative research projects that have shaped my career. A disclaimer is in order at the outset. In any semi-autobiographical account, humility is called for, and I have tried hard to be as modest as I can, realizing perhaps better than anyone else the limitations of my own contributions. I may not always have been successful and I beg your indulgence for any possible failure and lack of modesty. Over the course of my career, my research interests evolved. The progression was usually chronological but I often would revisit and embrace earlier themes and combine them with new ones. I must confess that my natural curiosity and impatience has led me to work simultaneously on research projects in different fields,1 as the brief review in the next subsection will attest. I would get bored of focusing on only one specific issue as I felt diminishing returns set in, and would embark on a new topic, to later often return to earlier subjects that I had temporarily abandoned. In retrospect, I can see a number of issues and concepts that have guided my research methodology and my choice of research themes. In a sense these issues and concepts, such as inequality, poverty, structure, interdependence, and globalization, are the threads of a canvas reflecting my modest contributions to development economics. In the next subsection I highlight briefly (and in the form of vignettes) some of my interactions with distinguished economists I am fortunate to have met and a number of collaborative projects that I was involved in with different development institutions. In some instances I try to enliven the text with personal anecdotes and the idiosyncrasies of some of those economists. Following this introduction I discuss in separate sections and in greater detail my research contributions in each of the following different, but interrelated, research themes: (i) African development; (ii) income distribution, inequality, and poverty; (iii) economic structure, interdependence, and quantitative economic development analysis; (iv) patterns of world trade, integration, and globalization; (v) the role of agriculture in economic development and structural transformation; (vi) employment and basic needs; and (vii) the role of institutions in economic 1 I would not recommend this model to young researchers. Concentrating on one specialized topic, in almost myopic fashion, is almost required today to gain tenure. The downside of this strategy is that it narrows the domain of competence and interest of young scholars. 1 development. The sequence in which I address these themes is not chronological and perhaps even follows a somewhat reverse chronological order. I suspect that that by unrolling the film of my life backwards, I understood better the progression of research themes and topics that I have adopted. Finally, the reader should be aware that in this paper that I prepared for the UNU-WIDER conference, I cover only the first three of the themes mentioned above. My intention is ultimately to complete covering the remaining themes and, hopefully, produce a little booklet of my lifelong journey. 1.1 Brief review of influential experiences and collaborations As an undergraduate, I studied at the Netherland School of Economics (1947–50). At that time the faculty included some distinguished members. I took courses in statistics from Jan Tinbergen (the first Economics Prize Nobel laureate). Johan Witteveen (who became managing director of the International Monetary Fund and later a minister of finance) taught me monetary economics and Koyk (famous for his theory of distributed lags) taught microeconomics. While I did not realize it at the time, Tinbergen was to have a seminal influence on my approach to economics, as I elaborate upon in Section 4. After I had immigrated to the USA and started my career, on some of the occasions I went back to the Netherlands he would invite me to his office for brief conversations. He was one of the most courteous, civilized, and disciplined people I ever met. We would sit around
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