Diagnostics before Prescription

摘要

Few branches of economics have wielded as much influence on the world of policy as development economics. Virtually every major development strategy of the last 50 years is associated with some pioneering research that provided its intellectual underpinnings. Consider some of the key milestones. The dominant import substitution policies of the 1950s and 1960s were the practical realization of the ideas of Prebisch (1959) and Singer (1964) and were based on the famous Prebisch-Singer thesis on the declining terms of trade for primary products and the dynamic benefits of manufacturing. The emphasis on development planning in those same decades was greatly influenced by Rosenstein-Rodan's (1943) "Big Push" framework, with its stress on increasing returns to scale and the need to kick-start growth through large-scale investments, and the planning model of Mahalanobis (1955), which argued that economic development could be accelerated by government encouragement of heavy industry.