Fernando Rugitsky in Phenomenal World:
The work of Arthur Lewis is one the best entry points for an engagement with classic development thinking. In his biography of the Caribbean economist, Robert Tignor argued that “Economic Development With Unlimited Supplies of Labor,” Lewis’s classic 1954 article, “galvanized the new field of development economics, providing it with a legitimacy that it had not previously enjoyed.” In the years in which I taught a course on development for postgraduate students at the University of São Paulo, I used to present the key works from the 1950s and 1960s—those by Rosenstein-Rodan, Nurkse, Furtado, Hirschman, Myrdal, Kuznets, and Pinto—as extensions and/or critiques of the “Lewis model.”
This is not to suggest that Lewis started the conversation. In fact, many of the ideas he articulated in the piece had been explored by others in the preceding decade. One critical plank of his argument, that there existed unlimited supplies of labor in peripheral economies, was the topic of extensive research, usually described as “disguised unemployment.” His contribution was to provide a unifying perspective on the process of development, combining key insights about the realities of the global periphery with a rigorous analysis of the interaction between income distribution, capital accumulation, and structural transformation. As Hirschman put it, “he managed—almost miraculously—to squeeze out of the simple proposition about underemployment a full set of ‘laws of motion’ for the typical underdeveloped country, as well as a wide range of recommendations for domestic and international economic policy.”
The influence that the 1954 article had—together with a few subsequent works—was such that Lewis was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics, making him the first Black person and the first (and, so far, only) economist from Latin America and the Caribbean to achieve that recognition.
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