Travelling with the GDP Through Early Development Economics’ History

In the vast body of development theoretical knowledge oneelement has been of a considerable longevity: the abstraction of aGross Domestic Product to represent a given economic entity.This paper suggests approaching the history of developmentthinking by travelling with the GDP through this discourse. TheGDP has been contested as an indicator of economicdevelopment ever since it was first put to use in the 1940s.However, the specific mode of knowledge which is expressed inthis abstraction has opened up a quite universally shared frameof reference in which a North-South-Divide became operational.The paper argues that GDP figures have become facts that traveleasily across the globe because constant work is beingundertaken to uphold the conditions for their mobility. Based onthis observation the development endeavour can be locatedhistorically in a manifold constellation of the statistical acquisitionof economic insight, political utopia, state intervention, theemerging prospect of economic planning in capitalist and noncapitalistsystems and the quest for the internationalstandardization of economic knowledge production.[...]