The Relevance of Ragnar Nurkse and Classical Development Economics

Rainer Kattel (), Jan Kregel and Erik Reinert ()

The Other Canon Foundation and Tallinn University of Technology Working Papers in Technology Governance and Economic Dynamics from TUT Ragnar Nurkse Department of Innovation and Governance

Abstract: In this essay we aim to show, first, how the classical development economics, that of Ragnar Nurkse's (1907-1957) generation, epitomized the best development practices of the past 500 years and crafted them into what Krugman rightly calls high development theory. It is not a coincidence that the post-World-War-II era, when Nurkse and others ruled the development mainstream, is one of exceptionally good performance for many poor countries. Second, we argue that the alleged death of the classical development economics and subsequent rise of the Washington Consensus has to do not so much with increasing modeling in economics, a way of research purposely discarded by many classical development thinkers, but much more with misunderstanding the reasons for East Asia's success and Latin America's demise; we show that the root cause of this misunderstanding - that goes in fact back to 'misreading' key passages in Adam Smith - is the role of technology, or of increasing returns activities, and of finance, in development. Third, we aim to indicate key areas of further research that the current development mainstream should pursue in order to re-learn how to create middle-income economies and middle-class jobs.

Pages: 32 pages
Date: 2009-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his, nep-hpe and nep-pke
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hum.ttu.ee/wp/paper21.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:tth:wpaper:21

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in The Other Canon Foundation and Tallinn University of Technology Working Papers in Technology Governance and Economic Dynamics from TUT Ragnar Nurkse Department of Innovation and Governance Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Shobhit Shakya ().