Review Article: Development Economics

Here is a “critical survey of development economics” by an author who has himself made major contributions to that body of literature and who had a strong influence on the way it developed in the 1970s. It is immensely ambitious, not only in the breadth of topics treated but in the author's determination to place his own stamp on all of them, rather than surveying the views of others. It is also, incidentally a reassertion of the qualities of carefully reasoned, tautly expressed qualitative arguments which owe little to mathematics or econometrics — qualities which used to distinguish British from North American economists more than they do today.