Traveling with the GDP Through Early Development Economics' History
In the vast body of development theoretical knowledge one element has been of a considerable longevity: the abstraction of a Gross Domestic Product to represent a given economic entity. This paper suggests approaching the history of development thinking by travelling with the GDP through this discourse. The GDP has been contested as an indicator of economic development ever since it was first put to use in the 1940s. However, the specific mode of knowledge which is expressed in this abstraction has opened up a quite universally shared frame of reference in which a North-South-Divide became operational. The paper argues that GDP figures have become facts that travel easily across the globe because constant work is being undertaken to uphold the conditions for their mobility. Based on this observation the development endeavour can be located historically in a manifold constellation of the statistical acquisition of economic insight, political utopia, state intervention, the emerging prospect of economic planning in capitalist and noncapitalist systems and the quest for the international standardization of economic knowledge production.
Prasantha Chandra Mahalanobis, 1893-1972
Prasantha Chandra Mahalanobis died on 28 June 1972, three weeks after an abdominal operation in a nursing home at Calcutta. The death occurred one day before his seventy-ninth birthday when he was still active doing research work, managing the affairs of the Indian Statistical Institute as its Secretary and Director, and working for the Indian Government as Honorary Statistical Adviser to the Cabinet. The Professor, as Mahalanobis was popularly known, was a physicist by training, a statistician by instinct and a planner by conviction. He became a Professor of physics at the Presidency College, Calcutta, in 1922 and taught physics for over thirty years. His statistical interests led him to found the Indian Statistical Institute (I.S.I.) for advanced research and training in statistics and start a new journal in statistics, Sankhyā, both of which enjoy international reputation. Lack of formal training in economics did not prevent him from undertaking a major responsibility in drafting the Second Five Year Economic Plan for India. He believed in perspective planning and used simple logical ideas in deriving an economic model for planning in under-developed countries. As a member of the Planning Commission, he sold the idea of making large investments in heavy industries setting aside other sectors of development, a policy which helped the country considerably in rapid industrialization, although agricultural development received a temporary setback. That a physicist turned statistician had played a more important role in India’s national economic planning than professional economists could only be true of Mahalanobis with his sharp intellect and versatile interests.
Deliberative Democracy and the Resource Curse: A Nationwide Experiment in Tanzania
Oil and gas discoveries in developing countries are often associated with short-sighted economic policies and, in response, calls to insulate resource management from populist impulses. We report on a randomized experiment testing methods to overcome this apparent tension between sound resource governance and democratic politics. Soon after Tanzania’s discovery of major natural gas reserves, we invited a nationally representative sample of voters to an intensive public deliberation of policy options featuring nationally recognized experts and small-group discussions. Democratic deliberation reinforced the public’s strong preference for rapid spending of gas revenues, but also increased support for various prudential and economically orthodox measures, including independent oversight of gas revenues, limits on government borrowing, and selling gas abroad rather than subsidizing fuel at home. These effects were driven by deliberation per se, rather than a pure information treatment, and show no evidence of contamination by facilitatoror peer-effects in group deliberations. www.cgdev.org Justin Sandefur, Nancy Birdsall, James Fishkin, and Mujobu Moyo