Development Economics
In 1984, the World Bank recognised Clark as a pioneer in development economics. He found himself alongside illustrious contemporaries such as Albert Hirschman, Gunnar Myrdal, Jan Tinbergen, Walt Rostow, Peter Bauer and Sir Arthur Lewis.
Even before he assumed the Directorship of the AERI in 1953, Clark had been one of the first development economists writing on comparative economic development, as seen in The Conditions ofEconomic Progress (see Rostow 1990; Arndt 1990). Moreover, Rostow (ibid.: 387-389) identified several additional unique contributions made by Clark. They can be summarised as: first, increasing returns and the public sector's role in economic development; second, the stages of agricultural productivity and rural-urban migration of labour; and, third, how population growth was a boon in promoting an increase in real income per capita. However, Rostow overlooked Clark's later work on transport and land use, on how the revolutions in land transport from the eighteenth century onward had overturned agricultural and industrial practices, and on how cities developed. For instance, the arrival of the railways meant that big cities could have a greater concentration of industry than before.
Two other volumes which earned Clark the status as an innovator in development economics were The Economics of Subsistence Agriculture, co-authored
with Margaret Haswell in 1964, and Population Growth and Land Use (Clark 1967). Before these volumes, Clark had spent a fair part of the 1950s examining global food supplies and whether the Food and Agriculture Organisation’s (FAO) dire findings of the extent of world hunger were true. Clark had been drawn to the issue by Lord Boyd-Orr (1950: 11), the first Director-General of the FAO, who had announced that ‘a lifetime of malnutrition and actual hunger is the lot of at least two-thirds of mankind’.
A querulous Clark (1951c, 1953, 1954b, 1962) embarked on gathering evidence on food supplies and human nutritional requirements to debunk Boyd-Orr’s observation which he later described as ‘the most incorrect statement of human history’ (Clark quoted in Johns 1967: 2). It was Clark’s thesis that population growth acted as a spur to agricultural improvement and that such growth preceded industrialisation. He presented many historical allusions showing a positive link between population expansion and economic progress. Despite this, Clark was irritated that the FAO continued to trade on fears that rising populations put pressure on the world’s ability to feed itself. Over a 20-year period, Clark doggedly criticised the FAO’s estimates of food requirements per head and of world hunger which, he argued, had been prepared to suit their own purposes (see Clark 1970: 30). He was astonished to hear FAO officials say that sometimes they made statements about the extent of world hunger first and then gathered evidence to support it.Addressing the thirtieth British Liberal Summer School in 1956, Clark repudiated the prophets of doom who, he said, showed a complete lack of awareness of ‘the simplest facts of geography and agriculture’ and of ‘the extraordinary rapidity’ with which scarce materials and fibres could be replaced by substitutes (Clark quoted in Anonymous 1956). By 1957, the FAO had changed its tune, now claiming that half of the population in the developing world (as distinct from the entire world) was malnourished. They would continue to revise the figure downwards as Clark forensically examined their statistics.
It was at Oxford that Clark produced two outstanding works in development economics. The Economics of Subsistence Agriculture, co-authored with Margaret Haswell, looked at how the bulk of the world’s population lived in less-developed countries and, embedded within a traditional agricultural setting, lacked basic amenities such as clothing, housing, medicine and education.
However, it was transport which was identified as the overriding factor holding back agricultural productivity and perpetuating poverty.The book considered how a subsistence cultivator at village level divided his time between production and leisure, land requirements, exchange and consumption preferences. Clark and Haswell underlined the evolution of agriculture, from pre-agricultural man, who required almost 90 square kilometres to obtain his food, to the primitive cultivator and, finally, to the settled cultivator, who required just one to five square kilometres.
This investigation into the economics of subsistence agriculture made Clark a physiocrat, believing that the agricultural sector had an important role to play in economic development. The authors advanced their “neo-Ricardian principle”, positing that the proportion of the labour force able to be employed in non-agricultural activity was governed by the productivity of the agricultural sector. That is, the proportion of the labour force transferring to non- agricultural employment was a consequence, not a cause, of the increase in agricultural productivity.
Clark's second effort, Population Growth and Land Use, which appeared in 1967, was a treatise on population growth, emphasising that increases in population were the locomotive for technological innovation and industrial land use. Despite its faults and idiosyncrasies, the volume was described as a tour de force (Kirk 1968: 1,011), and its impact marked something of an Indian summer for Clark. Population Growth and Land Use certainly showed off his talents, not just as a statistician but also as an economist, historian and urban designer. A compendious, synthesised work drawing upon a wealth of sources, it encapsulated views on fecundity and fertility, mortality, long-run trends in world population, the sociology underpinning reproduction, and the economic consequences of population in terms of density and prosperity.
As the title denotes, the book adopts a long-run view focused on patterns of human reproductive capacity amongst nations and societies, population capacity, food supplies and urban densities.
Given the temper of the times and concern about population outrunning food supplies, there was a contrarian twist in the preface where Clark stated: ‘The principal problems created by population growth are not those of poverty, but of exceptionally rapid increases in wealth in certain favoured regions of growing population, their attraction of further population by migration and the unmanageable spread of the cities' (Clark 1967: xi). That is, the real problem facing humanity was no longer resources, but finding space for housing and industry in a bid to avoid rampant urbanisation.Twenty years in the making, Population Growth and Land Use was, then, a ‘personal statement' conveying Clark's earnestly held views about population, the use of the world's resources, urban development and economic growth. He qualified it as only a ‘preliminary attempt' (Clark 1967: ix) at the interrelationship between population growth and economic growth. A second edition, released in 1977, included a new chapter highlighting the striking decline in fertility below the replacement level in many Western countries and in the socialist republics of Eastern Europe. This decline was attributed to deep-seated sociological factors, including the rise of the nuclear family, contraception, compulsory education and the prohibition of child labour.
Despite still having five years to run on his contract as Director of the AERI, Clark decided to leave Oxford in mid-1969 and return to Australia. Many might have been mystified as to why he wanted to leave Oxford, with all its trappings, and remove himself to the relative academic backwater of Australia. There were, however, some compelling reasons for his move. Monash University had offered him an honorary research position within its Department of Economics. More significantly, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Melbourne had set aside funds for him to head up his own research office which was to be called the Institute for Economic Progress. Lastly, Clark delighted in the prospect of spending his retirement in Australia.
Gavin McCrone (1989: 70), who knew Clark at Brasenose, observed that, given his many original contributions across a variety of areas, some figures at Oxford lamented that he had not been given a full chair in economics there. The same can also be said about neither Oxford nor Cambridge awarding Clark an honorary doctorate; it prompted Arthur Seldon (1977: 5) to observe that Clark can be said ‘to have done Britain more honour than she did him'.
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