Much of development policy has been based on the search for a short to do list that would get countries moving. In this paper I argue that economic activity requires a large and highly interacting set of public policies and services, which constitute inputs into the production process. This is...

What causes distinct trajectories of market development? Why did the modern market economy, characterized by impersonal exchange, first emerge in the West? This paper presents a theory of market development and evaluates it based on the histories of England, China, and Japan. The analysis...

In the vast body of development theoretical knowledge one element has been of a considerable longevity: the abstraction of a Gross Domestic Product to represent a given economic entity. This paper suggests approaching the history of development thinking by traveling with the GDP through this...

In this collection, I can therefore really only scratch the surface. My objective in this collection and especially in this introductory essay is therefore not to be comprehensive, nor to go deep into the details of the many fascinating threads that jointly make up the rich fabric of development...

John Rawls's "Law of Peoples" has come in for a good deal of critical discussion recently, and most political philosophers seem to find it wanting for one reason or another. This study argues that Rawls's is a plausible view of what developed countries owe developing countries. Rawls formulates...

The years that Albert O. Hirschman lived in Colombia helped him shape the contents for his main publication: The strategy of economic development. The experience gained during his stay in Colombia, where he participated in government missions across the country, enabled him to design a research...

This essay analyzes three contributions of Albert Hirschman that are important to understand the Latin American industrialization process.The first are the features of this process vis-à-vis the “late industrialization” cases in the European continent analyzed by Alexander Gerschenkron. The...

While it is futile to search for any ‘magic policy recipe’ automatically yielding industrialization, the contributions to the book, we argue, do indeed help in identifying some basic ingredients and principles that successful policy arrangements historically had and have in common. In this...