Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Albert Hirschman is a European intellectual who migrated to the United States. This book was written after his wide experience in Latin American economic development policy. The reason I cite this book is that he is one of the early proponents of the recent revival of the classical economists’ emphasis on the political economy approach to development.
Your next book is The Strategy of Economic Development by Albert Hirschman. With this book we are now skipping almost 200 years to the middle of the 1950s. Albert Hirschman is a European intellectual who migrated to the United States. This book was written after his wide experience in Latin American policy-making for economic development. The reason I cite this book is that he is one of the early proponents of what in recent years has been revived as the political-economy approach to development.
Economics has made a big transition. In Adam Smith’s time, and even later on with other classical economists, they were not just interested in economics per se but also in the political basis of economics. But then from around the end of the 19th century for many decades the focus of economics was narrowed down to purely technical economic analysis, leaving aside the political basis of economic decisions and happenings. However, in more recent years the earlier tradition has been revived, of looking at it from the political point of view as well, in order to understand the political background and underpinnings of economic policies.
In the last 25 years there has been a great deal of work in development economics in this area, which is also my own area of interest. A great deal of my China-India book deals with political economy in both countries.
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Pranab Bardhan is Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. He has done theoretical and field studies research on rural institutions in poor countries, on political economy of development policies, and on international trade. A part of his work is in the interdisciplinary area of economics, political science and social anthropology. He was chief editor of the Journal of Development Economics for 1985-2003. He was the co-chair of the MacArthur Foundation-funded Network on the Effects of Inequality on Economic Performance for 1996-2007. He held the Distinguished Fulbright Chair at the University of Siena, Italy in 2008-9. He is now the BP Centennial Professor at London School of Economics for 2010 and 2011
