ABSTRACT
A little over a decade ago Dudley Seers concluded his well known essay on the future of development economics by proposing the ‘modest but revolutionary’ slogan that Economics is the study of Economies. 1 Too many economists, Seers contended, still insisted on writing and teaching as if their discipline consisted of a body of theory which was universally valid and capable of application with a similar measure of success in the industrialized and the unindustrialized countries of the world. The fact was that conventional economics was based almost exclusively upon the ‘special case’ of a handful of industrially developed economies. When applied elsewhere it tended to focus on the wrong factors and to yield models which did not fit at all closely the way in which economies actually operated.
