Hans Wolfgang Singer, development economist, died on February 26 2006. Singer's best known work relates to the declining terms of trade experienced by developing countries. First published in 1949, it tracked the long-term decline in terms of trade between developing and developed countries and...

Tignor’s book attempts to give us the measure of the man in his professional life, with enough insight into personal development to help in this task. Lewis comes across as a man of brilliant insight and clear thinking, a man of principle and integrity, but a man of deeply personal...

Why is underdevelopment so persistent? One explanation is that poor countries do not have institutions that can support growth. Because institutions (both good and bad) are persistent, underdevelopment is persistent. An alternative view is that underdevelopment comes from poor education. Neither...

This essay examines the evolution of thinking on development and development policy, with a special focus on economic issues, in the last fifty years. In particular, it explores the interaction between ideology and experience in determining the course of economic thinking and policy on...

The present paper aims at driving home a hitherto-neglected and perhaps often muted (but important) point, namely, that the confusions and identity crisis that had gripped development economics in the 1980s. This was mainly due to its perennial vulnerability, unlike other branches of economics,...

There are relatively few theoretical models or empirical analyses of clientelism which analyse the sources and consequences of clientelism. Data from household surveys in rural West Bengal are used to analyse the political clientelism. [BREAD working paper no. 369]....

In the paper there is a use of nation-wide policy of randomly allocating village council headships to women to identify the impact of female political leadership on the governance of projects implemented under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act in India. Using primary survey data, they...