A tribute to professor Sanjaya Lall: a world class industrial development researcher

Abstract

Sanjaya Lall, professor of development economics at the University of Oxford died on 18 June 2005. Sanjaya Lall’s scholarly credentials were recognized arly in his life when he won a gold medal in Patna in 1960, ande St. John’s College Prize for achieving a first class honours degree at Oxford University in 1963. A prolific development researcher and writer, he eventually published 33 books and hundreds f internationally oacclaimed articles. In Sanjaya Lall Oxford University had a truly world class scholar who championed intensely the logic behind why some economies enjoyed higher learning and innovation capabilities than others. To Sanjaya Lall technological capability building was the driver of export competitiveness and growth and hence the path developing economies must take to achieve development. Driven by an epistemological conviction that theory must be defined by evidence, Sanjaya Lall fought an often lonely crusade against the ideologues peddling uncritically, on the one hand, neo-liberalism and, on the other, populism. Unsatisfied with the mainstream economic theory Sanjaya Lall increasingly went to the field to seek empirical ammunition to make sense of the alternative theoretical vision he began to construct to understand the complex problems of development. Sanjaya Lall was less scathing on the partisan populists only because they neither had the power nor the network to influence development policy. Sanjaya Lall’s humility, gentleness and keenness to lead the young selflessly have few peers even among the exceptional scholars. Supremely confident of his abilities and heavily committed to his curious disciples, Sanjaya Lall spent considerable time engaging with promising scholars. His open and inquisitive mind often allowed horizontal dialogues between himself and his students. His brilliance gave him the wit, his artistry gave him the reach, his honesty drove him towards the truth, his selfless haracter gave him the conviction, hisc confidence gave him the generosity, his commitment gave him the industry, his diligence made him meticulous and his kindness won him popularity. Sanjaya Lall had originally made a name in the field of multinationals nd developing economies, articulatinga some of the best explanations of circumstances when linkages will take place and how crowding out can be avoided at host-sites. However, because a number of development pillars interlocked and often influenced the process collectively, Sanjaya Lall began to research and publish on trade and competitiveness, globalization and its economic consequences, industrial policy and industrialization, and innovation and technological capabilities. Although all the above have very much been at the heart of the research many of us have and are still doing, I believe it is in the last area that Sanjaya Lall made most his illuminating contributions to the world of knowledge. Sanjaya Lall found that globalization affected economies differently, benefiting those that enjoyed the technological capabilities (both endowed and created) to compete and draining those that failed to engender them. He was particularly concerned for the Sub-Saharan African economies where increased economic integration into the world economy affected them negatively. Sanjaya Lall pioneered novel methodologies to demonstrate the importance of technological capabilities– through arms-length transactions, and active learning and innovation– for poor economies to ove up them development ladder. Consistent with the theoretical logic expounded by Marshall, Tibor Scitovsky and Rosenstein-Rodan, Sanjaya Lall was among the earliest scholars to dismiss the use of the neoclassical production function to estimate spillovers. He had become increasingly concerned with the neo-liberal siege on development economics, what I have begun to call the “mathematics without economic institution syndrome”. While he recognized the important contributions mathematics was making in economics, he was concerned