ABSTRACT
Economic development was a central concern of Western classical economists from the eighteenth century onwards, but this concern was ‘with the capitalist development of their own Western world’ (Arndt 1987:30). This is quite understandable since Western countries were then in the early stages of economic development via industrialization. The challenge of economic development for classical theorists was ‘opulence’, or how nations prosper. Adam Smith’s classic treatise was entitled The Wealth of Nations (Smith 1776). Smith, who was a professor of moral philosophy, is acknowledged as the founder of mainstream economics as a positive, value-free science.
