We are forced to think that humanity can only proceed through polemics, and that changing proportions and measures is necessary for humans who fight to affirm their ideals.

Chabod 1989 [1961], p. 65

# **Introduction**

The study of economic development followed a path from the center to the periphery of economics—as Bardhan (1993, p. 130) noted. This marginalization was partially masked by the fact that this discipline was being progressively recognized as being entitled to a specific identity. In other words, it was progressively institutionalized and marginalized. “The classical economists of the 17th, 18th and early 19th century were, of course, all development economists” but it was only after 1940 that development economics acquired a well-defined connotation as a discipline dedicated to the study of the causes and solutions for economic backwardness. The outbreak of the Cold War; the birth of many new and poor autonomous states; and the action of intellectual elites, within those new states, that imported the ideals of modernization and industrialization from metropolitan countries, were among the principal causes of the new relevance that the subject of development economics had suddenly acquired (Myrdal 1968; Rostow 1990 [1960]).

This paper focuses on the process that led to the shaping of this new discipline through the use of archival material witnessing the activities of two outstanding pioneering development economists. It deals with the identity of this discipline such as it emerged from debates among its “pioneers”. It neither deals with the relation between development economics and the broader field of economics, nor with the elements that allow the identification of development economics as an inherently consistent field of study.

Usual analyses tell the story of a fierce confrontation between completely antithetical theories or approaches, impossible to compromise. Good examples are “balanced growth” versus “unbalanced growth”, or “program loans” versus “project loans”.

Still, even if these reconstructions are correct in describing the early debates among development economists, they fail to sufficiently take into consideration the reality of development economics as it was practiced by those very scholars whose books and articles are the basis for today’s reconstructions of the early years of their sub-discipline. Were more consideration given to the _practice_ of development economics, _theoretical_ conflicts would need to be reassessed. In other words, we should take into account that there was a gap between the debates in the _journals_ and their origins in the _field_ . Often, economists agreed much more in practice than they did in theory<sup>1</sup> .

Sections 2 to 4 of this paper describe some debates that shaped development economics in its early years, and that reverberated also within the World Bank. The reconstruction of these

> 1 This paper does not intend to demonstrate that those early debates were useless or meaningless. Some commentators have noted that those debates, far from being useless, were essential in the process of growth of the discipline. This paper is consistent with this view, and it pays homage to that method of fruitful partisan juxtaposition.

2