The Early Years

In the 1950s and 1960s, Herbert Frankel, Hla Myint, Colin Clark, Thomas Balogh, Peter Ady, Ursula Hicks and Peggy (Margaret) Haswell were the most active of the development economists at Oxford.

Frankel was a South African and a dislike of the paternalism of the apart­heid semi-colonial State there inspired his ideas. While at the London School of Economics (LSE), he had also been influenced by laissez-faire anti-State economists, such as Hayek, Frank Paish and Lionel Robbins. A precursor of the conditionality later practiced by the IFIs, Frankel argued that aid should be dependent on ‘the integration of their countries into the free world econ­omy' (Frankel 1952: 324). However, unlike many in this school of econom­ics, he was suspicious of mathematics and believed that ‘economic behaviour was inherently embedded in the peculiarities of individual societies' (Toye 2009: 176). Myint became Lecturer in Colonial Economics at Oxford in 1950 later renamed Lecturer in Underdeveloped Countries and left in 1965. Like Frankel, he was greatly influenced by Hayek (his doctoral supervisor) and by his experience in Burma where he worked intermittently as an eco­nomic adviser.

Balogh, who became a Fellow of Balliol in 1940, was a heterodox political economist, an adviser to numerous governments and central banks, including those of India, Malta, Jamaica, Greece, Mauritius, Algeria and the Sudan, as well as being Adviser on Economic Affairs in the Cabinet Office of the UK during Harold Wilson's premiership. His contributions to development eco­nomics were mostly critical rather than creative, showing the weaknesses in a variety of models and policies. He was welcomed by progressive governments for his ability to understand the politics of decision-making and to identify equitable solutions (Balogh 1963, 1966).

Clark was Director of the Agricultural Economics Research Institute at Oxford from 1953 to 1969. In contrast to Frankel and Balogh, he was not primarily interested in theory, but in the accumulation of facts, drawing con­clusions from broad trends. His approach can be seen as a precursor of Irving Kravis, Simon Kuznets and Hollis Chenery. The first edition of Clark's most well-known contribution, Conditions of Economic Progress (Clark 1940), pre­dated his Oxford appointment, although the third and final edition appeared in 1957. He was pioneering in comparing income per capita and agricultural productivity across countries, and in exploring trends in sectoral shares in national income. Substantive conclusions included the observation that the share of agriculture declined as incomes rose, and the share of industry and services increased; he also pointed to increasing agricultural productivity as necessary for industrial development (Clark and Haswell 1964).

Hicks specialised in the public finances of developed countries, particularly the UK, writing a widely used textbook on the issue (Hicks 1947). She applied this expertise to developing countries, visiting, advising and writing, often with her husband, the eminent economist John Hicks. Hers was among the first analytic discussions of local government and local revenue raising in developing countries (Hicks 1961).^[7] She also contributed to the analysis of federal systems of government, exploring factors that led to such systems and those that accounted for their breakdown (Hicks 1978).

Ady was appointed the first Lecturer in Development Economics at Oxford in 1947 and a stand-in Director of QEH in 1976. She made significant con­tributions to national income accounting in developing countries, first help­ing to create integrated social accounts in Burma (Ady 1951) and subsequently reviewing accounts in a number of African countries, making the French and British approaches consistent, and pointing to data deficiencies and require­ments (Ady and Courcier 1960).

Haswell became Lecturer in Tropical Economics in 1959. She conducted village studies both in West Africa and India, revisiting a village in the Gambia over four decades, from 1947 to 1987, as well as writing a textbook on tropi­cal agriculture (Haswell 1967, 1973, 1991). Her village studies led to two important conclusions: first, the need to take a holistic approach to the analy­sis of rural change; and second, the importance of analysing changes as they occur over time, rather than taking a snapshot (Haswell and Hunt 1991). Her work carefully traced how production patterns were affected by changing demography, investments in modern infrastructure, including roads and schools, and worsening environmental factors. Hers was the first of a number of important long-term village studies by Oxford economists, as we shall see later, and the only one of an African village.

Thus, while Oxford economists made important contributions to develop­ment analysis over these early years, they were largely individual contributions and not collaborative efforts as occurred subsequently.

3.2