This paper was prepared for a symposium about Erwin Dekker’s (2021) recent biography of the Dutch economist Jan Tinbergen, with attention to Tinbergen’s work as a development economist in the post-war era. Tinbergen’s “uniqueness” among other development economists is discussed, as...

The origins of “capital fundamentalism” – the notion that physical capital accumulation is the primary determinant of economic growth – have been often ascribed to Harrod's and Domar's proposition that the rate of growth is the product of the saving rate and of the output-capital ratio....

The theory of economic development was an exception to Paul Samuelson's claim of being a "generalist" in economics. It was a hard subject to tackle analytically because of the intrinsic difficulty of some of the concepts involved, such as increasing returns and long-term economic evolution....