ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on how the UN and its secretariat successfully helped pioneer a pragmatic understanding and definition of development processes, on which some of the best economic minds were engaged. One of the UN's early development mentors was Alexander Loveday, who, from his seat in the League's Economic and Financial Organisation in Princeton, continued his preoccupation during the war with business cycles and the international transmission of depressions. The economic emphasis in UN development thinking could be explained by the fact that the thinkers were almost exclusively those trained in economics. In the 1970s, the International Labour Organization (ILO) pioneered a development approach which emphasized the need for economic strategy to tackle three overlapping employment problems: low incomes, low productivity, and frustrated job-seekers. The Founex Report was a pioneering text in this regard, stressing the environmental problems of poverty and making the case for development as a cure for, rather than a cause of, environmental problems.
