Michele Alacevich
This book project will offer a synthetic intellectual history of the discipline of development economics from World War II to the Twenty-first century in transnational perspective. Though the idea of development and related concepts (such as catch-up, human development, and economic growth) have a much longer story, development economics as a discipline was very much the result of the concomitant demise of empires and onset of the Cold War in the mid-Twentieth century. Though the discipline emerged as a tool to stimulate the economic growth of the newly emerging national states, the network of scholars and practitioners that shaped it had a distinct transnational character. I plan to organize the narrative in three parts: the birth of the discipline after World War II, characterized by a strong theoretical and institutional identity; its crisis in the 1970s and 1980s, weakened by an ambivalent development record and overwhelmed by a neoliberal counterrevolution in the political and the scholarly arenas; and its resurgence, albeit no longer as a distinctive discipline but as an applied field of mainstream economics, in the last thirty years or so. The focus will be on the intellectual debates that shaped the discipline as they emerged from the interaction of scholarly discussions, institutional needs, practitioners’ feedback, and political inputs.
Development Economics: An Intellectual History will offer the first comprehensive and up-to-date assessment of a discipline that has accompanied the processes of decolonization and the emergence of new sovereign states in the postwar world, informed international relations and the operations of multilateral organizations, and contributed new theoretical perspectives to the economics discipline in the face of a rapidly changing international environment.