ABSTRACT
Michal Kalecki devoted his whole life to comparative studies of functioning and dynamics of different economic systems. At the beginning of his career, first as an economic journalist, and later as a researcher with an economic institute in Warsaw, he concentrated his attention on problems of a peripheral and backward capitalist economy, with an obsolete agrarian structure and heavy dependence on foreign capital, striving to overcome the Great Depression of the 1930s. Though the notion of an underdeveloped country was not yet adopted at that time, his knowledge of realities of the Polish economy would help him later to address the problems of economic underdevelopment. It may be useful to remember that the theory of underdevelopment as we have it in mind today was formulated in a great part in England in the early 1940s, on the grounds of studies aimed at elaboration of a programme of reconstruction of Central and South-European economies from damages they suffered during World War II. Refugees from Eastern countries were to play a leading role in that intellectual venture.2
