ABSTRACT
In the 1960s the emerging field of development economics which I became exposed to as a graduate student understood its mission to be finding the answer to the ‘big question’ – given that the world is divided into two unequal parts, respectively advanced/modern and backward/pre-modern, what polices can cause the second to become more like the first? The economic descriptors used to distinguish these two worlds and measure the gulf that separated them were various, but the most fundamental measurements focused on agriculture. In advanced countries, the agricultural labour force was small because labour productivity was high. This was the foundation of their urbanized and industrial economies. In the less developed countries, the majority – often an overwhelmingly majority – of the labour force remained in agriculture because labour productivity was low and – therefore – unable to support urban and industrial sectors of any size.
