The Poverty of "Development Economics"

Last updated
The Poverty of "Development Economics"
Author Deepak Lal
LanguageEnglish
PublisherInstitute of Economic Affairs
Publication date
1983
Publication place United Kingdom

The Poverty of "Development Economics" is a 1983 book by Deepak Lal. Adam Szirmai notes that this book "summarised and popularised much of the earlier criticisms on the dominant paradigm" in development economics and that it "was an influential publication which contributed to the enormous shift in thinking about development." [1] The dominant paradigm that he was criticising is described by Lal as the "dirigiste dogma". However, this has been criticised with claims that Lal overstated his case claiming that those he criticised had wanted to "supplant" rather than supplement the price and market system, but that he failed to provide evidence for this. [2]

Contents

The four essential elements of the "dirigiste dogma"

He characterizes this "dirigiste dogma" as having four essential elements:

  1. markets need supplanting (not merely supplementing) by "various forms of direct government control"
  2. that orthodox microeconomics concern with the allocation of given (admittedly possibly changing) resources is of minor importance when designing policy in developing economies. Rather policy should be concerned with designing and implementing a broad "strategy" of development - one whose focus is macroeconmic aggregates such as: savings, investment, the balance of payments, and the sectoral composition of production. Choosing between agriculture and industry.
  3. that the arguments for free trade are not valid for developing countries - justifying restrictions on trade and international payments.
  4. massive and continuing governmental intervention is required to redistribute assets and to manipulate prices in order to alleviate poverty and to improve income distribution. [3]

For Lal the sources of this "dogma" is Keynesian macroeconomics - with its macro quantity adjustments, the growth and spread of national income accounting, the increased use of macroeconometrics (a la Tinbergen and his associates and successors), and the increased use input-output analysis (a la Leontief). While these may have helped our understanding of macroeconomics, Lal argues, but they have led to an underemphasis on the role of prices. [3]

This overfocusing on macroeconomic aggregates, also led to an ignoring of welfare economics. This later Lal argues provides the most useful analytical framework for examining the dirigistes' arguments about the inadequacies of the free market and the scope for government interventions due to missing markets or distributional worries. Lal stresses that in the "real-world" governments' interventions have both resource and distortion costs. Thus, he argues, in a second-best world government intervention should not be undertaken lightly just because of market failures. Rather a proper comparison with other alternatives such as nonintervention should be made. When this is done in each of the four exemplar areas in which he summarizes the historical experience of dirigiste intervention and orthodox counterpositions he argues non intervention comes out on top. [3]

Exemplars

The major elements of the "dirigiste dogma", the ideas that underlie them and the claims of this "dogma" are examined in four important areas of development economics:

  1. role of foreign trade and private capital flows
  2. role and appropriate form of industrialization
  3. the relationship between reductions in inequality, poverty alleviation and differing broad development strategies
  4. the role of market prices mechanism versus planning [3]

Conclusions

Lal's conclusion is that:

The Book

Lal, Deepak (1983), The Poverty of Development Economics, Institute of Economic Affairs, London

Lal, Deepak (1985), The Poverty of "Development Economics." Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Pp. 153.

Lal, Deepak (2000), The Poverty of "Development Economics. " 2d revised and expanded U.S. edition. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Reviews in Peer Reviewed Academic Journals

Asadullah, M Niaz (2002) The Poverty of "Development Economics", Latin American Politics and Society, Summer

Behrman, Jere R. (1987) The Poverty of "Development Economics" by Deepak Lal, A Book Review in The Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 95, No. 4 (Aug.), pp. 885–887

McGilvray, J. W. (1983) The poverty of ‘development economics’. Deepak Lal, Book Review, Managerial and Decision Economics Volume 6, Issue 4, Pages260 - 262

Szirmai, Adam (2002) The Poverty of "Development Economics" Book Review Economic Record, Vol. 78, 2002

Toye, John (1985) Dirigisme and development economics Cambridge Journal of Economics, 9, 1-14

Newspaper comment

The Times (1983) 'Third World Theories Attacked' (Michael Prest: Monday, Aug 22, pg. 13; Issue 61617; col F)

The Times (1983) 'Third World Theories face a Counter-revolution' (Michael Prest: Friday, Sep 09, pg. 15; Issue 61633; col B)

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Microeconomics</span> Behavior of individuals and firms

Microeconomics is a branch of economics that studies the behavior of individuals and firms in making decisions regarding the allocation of scarce resources and the interactions among these individuals and firms. Microeconomics focuses on the study of individual markets, sectors, or industries as opposed to the economy as a whole, which is studied in macroeconomics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Macroeconomics</span> Study of an economy as a whole

Macroeconomics is a branch of economics that deals with the performance, structure, behavior, and decision-making of an economy as a whole. This includes national, regional, and global economies. Macroeconomists study topics such as output/GDP and national income, unemployment, price indices and inflation, consumption, saving, investment, energy, international trade, and international finance.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Neoclassical economics</span> Approach to economics

Neoclassical economics is an approach to economics in which the production, consumption, and valuation (pricing) of goods and services are observed as driven by the supply and demand model. According to this line of thought, the value of a good or service is determined through a hypothetical maximization of utility by income-constrained individuals and of profits by firms facing production costs and employing available information and factors of production. This approach has often been justified by appealing to rational choice theory.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Market economy</span> Type of economic system

A market economy is an economic system in which the decisions regarding investment, production, and distribution to the consumers are guided by the price signals created by the forces of supply and demand. The major characteristic of a market economy is the existence of factor markets that play a dominant role in the allocation of capital and the factors of production.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Post-Keynesian economics</span> School of economic thought

Post-Keynesian economics is a school of economic thought with its origins in The General Theory of John Maynard Keynes, with subsequent development influenced to a large degree by Michał Kalecki, Joan Robinson, Nicholas Kaldor, Sidney Weintraub, Paul Davidson, Piero Sraffa and Jan Kregel. Historian Robert Skidelsky argues that the post-Keynesian school has remained closest to the spirit of Keynes' original work. It is a heterodox approach to economics.

A mixed economy is an economic system that accepts both private businesses and nationalized government services, like public utilities, safety, military, welfare, and education. A mixed economy also promotes some form of regulation to protect the public, the environment, or the interests of the state.

New Keynesian economics is a school of macroeconomics that strives to provide microeconomic foundations for Keynesian economics. It developed partly as a response to criticisms of Keynesian macroeconomics by adherents of new classical macroeconomics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Index of economics articles</span>

This aims to be a complete article list of economics topics:

In microeconomics, economic efficiency, depending on the context, is usually one of the following two related concepts:

The invisible hand is a metaphor inspired by the Scottish economist and moral philosopher Adam Smith that describes the incentives which free markets sometimes create for self-interested people to accidentally act in the public interest, even when this is not something they intended. Smith originally mentioned the term in two specific, but different, economic examples. It is used once in his Theory of Moral Sentiments when discussing a hypothetical example of wealth being concentrated in the hands of one person, who wastes his wealth, but thereby employs others. More famously, it is also used once in his Wealth of Nations, when arguing that governments do not normally need to force international traders to invest in their own home country. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and in The Wealth of Nations (1776) Adam Smith speaks of an invisible hand, never of the invisible hand.

Dirigisme or dirigism is an economic doctrine in which the state plays a strong directive (policies) role, contrary to a merely regulatory or non-interventionist role, over a market economy. As an economic doctrine, dirigisme is the opposite of laissez-faire, stressing a positive role for state intervention in curbing productive inefficiencies and market failures. Dirigiste policies often include indicative planning, state-directed investment, and the use of market instruments to incentivize market entities to fulfill state economic objectives.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John B. Taylor</span> American economist (born 1946).

John Brian Taylor is the Mary and Robert Raymond Professor of Economics at Stanford University, and the George P. Shultz Senior Fellow in Economics at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

In neoclassical economics, a market distortion is any event in which a market reaches a market clearing price for an item that is substantially different from the price that a market would achieve while operating under conditions of perfect competition and state enforcement of legal contracts and the ownership of private property. A distortion is "any departure from the ideal of perfect competition that therefore interferes with economic agents maximizing social welfare when they maximize their own". A proportional wage-income tax, for instance, is distortionary, whereas a lump-sum tax is not. In a competitive equilibrium, a proportional wage income tax discourages work.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of economic thought</span> Study of the development of economic thought

The history of economic thought is the study of the philosophies of the different thinkers and theories in the subjects that later became political economy and economics, from the ancient world to the present day.

Deepak Kumar Lal was an Indian-born British liberal economist, author, professor and consultant. Best known for his 1983 book, The Poverty of “Development Economics", Lal was also known for bucking conventional assumptions and for multidisciplinary approaches to thorny economic problems. His proposed solutions were typically in the vein of Hayek or the Austrian School of economic thinking.

The neoclassical synthesis (NCS), or neoclassical–Keynesian synthesis is an academic movement and paradigm in economics that worked towards reconciling the macroeconomic thought of John Maynard Keynes in his book The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936) with neoclassical economics.

The East Asian model, pioneered by Japan, is a plan for economic growth whereby the government invests in certain sectors of the economy in order to stimulate the growth of specific industries in the private sector. It generally refers to the model of development pursued in East Asian economies such as Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan. It has also been used by some to describe the contemporary economic system in Mainland China after Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms during the late 1970s and the current economic system of Vietnam after its Đổi Mới policy was implemented in 1986. Generally, as a country becomes more developed, the most common employment industry transitions from agriculture to manufacturing, and then to services.

Throughout modern history, a variety of perspectives on capitalism have evolved based on different schools of thought.

Jere Richard Behrman is an American economist and the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Economics at the University of Pennsylvania. He belongs to the world's most prominent development and education economists and human capital scholars, with a strong focus on Central and South America.

References

  1. The Poverty of "Development Economics" by Deepak Lal reviewed by Adam Szirmai; Economic Record, Vol. 78, 2002 Journal Article (The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2000), pp. xx + 175.
  2. Cypher, James M.; Dietz, James L. (2004). The Process of Economic Development. Psychology Press. ISBN   9780415254168 . Retrieved 6 January 2018.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 Behrman, Jere R. (1987)The Poverty of "Development Economics" by Deepak Lal, A Book Review in The Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 95, No. 4 (Aug.), pp. 885-887