NOTES ON ‘UNBALANCED GROWTH’

Abstract

[Ragnar Nurkse died, very suddenly and unexpectedly, on 6 May 1959. During the last days of his life he had been reading a proof of the article 'Unbalanced Growth' by Paul Streeten, which had been sent to him by the author, prior to its appearance in the June issue of Oxford Economic Papers. To this it is evident that he was meditating a reply, but no more than a few fragments of it were actually written. These have been put together by the care of Professor James Tobin, who, like Nurkse, was spending a sabbatical year at Geneva. Though they cannot convey very much of what he would have said if his life had been extended, they do perhaps give some idea of the direction in which his mind was moving, and are worth preserving as his last thoughts on an issue with which he had been so much concerned. One or two explanations should be given. Streeten's criticisms had been mainly directed against the first of the lectures which Nurkse had given at Istanbul in 1957 (Lectures on Economic Development, published by the Faculty of Economics, Istanbul, and the Faculty of Political Sciences, Ankara, in that year). There exists, however, a more recent writing by Nurkse (the Wicksell Lectures which he gave in Stockholm in early 1959, published in Stockholm under the title Patterns of Trade Development); this, however, did not appear until after Nurkse's death, so that it was not available to Streeten. It does, however, have considerable relevance. Returning to the Istanbul Lectures, it was Nurkse's view that a good many of the criticisms which Streeten advanced against his first lecture had been answered (or anticipated) in the second. Thus in the second lecture Nurkse had insisted on the importance of anticipatory overhead investment as a condition of economic growth (pp. 22-27) like Streeten on p. 179. (He did not see the footnote which Streeten subsequently added on that page.) It is from this point that his words begin.]