Though there has been much general debate recently about the pros and cons of capital controls, there remains substantial confusion and uncertainty about what exactly is entailed by the term ‘restraining global capital flows’. Popular discussion around this has typically been long...

Using information on listed firms in each of the industry groups at the two-digit level within Manufacturing this study investigates whether the radical shift in trade policy in India in 1991 resulted in a reduction in market power and/or an improvement in scale efficiency. They estimate a...

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,...