Writing the History of Development Economics

This question, apparently unproblematic, has been at the center of the development discourse for decades now. Indeed, the first major debate that shaped the discipline—the 1950s balanced-growth versus unbalanced-growth debate—was fought under the rubric of what actually defined development economics as a distinct disciplinary field. Albert Hirschman (1958, 51) famously criticized the theory of balanced growth, whose principal authors he identified in Paul Rosenstein-Rodan, Ragnar Nurkse, and Tibor Scitovsky, on the ground that the theory failed “as a theory of development.” As Hirschman put it,