A Critique of Development Economics in the U.S.

The trickle of disaffection with the orthodox literature on the economics of poor countries in the 1950s has enlarged to a deluge of discontent in the last decade. By the early 1970s, even major contributors to the field were complaining that the study of the field did not add greatly to the understanding of poverty in the underdeveloped world, nor to the bag of tools useful for policy [Higgins, 1973: 1380; Meier, 1970: 59-60].