Introduction
Ian Malcolm David Little, who died on 13 July 2012, at the age of 93, was one of Britain's foremost economists and, for a time, the world's most influential development economist.
Ian had a mind of unusual penetration, subtlety and creative power. The quantity and quality of his scholarly output was impressive, and he wrote or edited around twenty books and about a hundred papers, some of which were path-breaking. He also made an impact beyond the groves of academe. His seminal writings undermined the orthodox postwar view that protectionism and dirigiste central planning were the road to prosperity for developing countries. He became, thereby, one of the intellectual leaders of the shift in most of these countries towards liberal trade policies, which made a major contribution to lifting millions of people out ofWe thank the British Academy for its kind permission to reprint here our memoir “Ian Malcolm David Little, 1918—2012”, Biographical Memoirs of Bellows of the British Academy, 2014, XIII, London: Oxford University Press: 315—349.
C. Bliss (*)
Nuffield College, Oxford University, Oxford, UK e-mail: christopher.bliss@nuffield.ox.ac.uk
V. Joshi
Merton College, Oxford University, Oxford, UK e-mail: vijay.joshi@merton.ox.ac.uk
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 471
R. A. Cord (ed.), The Palgrave Companion to Oxford Economics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58471-9_20
poverty in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Astonishingly, he was not knighted.
This chapter is divided into several sections. The next section is an account of Ian's life, career and personality. Later sections discuss his writings in the main areas which bear his imprint: theoretical welfare economics; applied welfare economics (project evaluation); trade and development; and the Indian economy. The last section appraises his work as investment bursar of Nuffield College, Oxford.
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