Chapter 13 analyzes his contributions to development economics. It is argued that his central contribution is not an economic theory of development, but rather a technique for development planning. Tinbergen’s work on planning is mainly concerned with implementing development plans, which he argued should be done using his three-stage planning model, consisting of the macro phase, the industry phase, and the project phase. Later work expanded this model to include regional planning and education planning. After the initial period between 1955 and 1960, most of Tinbergen’s work on development economics was increasingly about a vision of an integrated world economy. It is demonstrated that econometric and analytical work moved to the background and that his visionary and institutional work moved to the foreground. Crucial in his vision of the international economic order was his experience in the Netherlands. The chapter shows how his vision of the international economic structure crucially relied on analogies with the national economic order. The chapter concludes with some early reflections on his development economic work and suggests that it largely disregarded the ethos of self-help and emancipation that Tinbergen knew from his youth in the AJC.

Chapter 16 is the third of three chapters to reflect on the rise of economic expertise during the twentieth century. In this chapter the debate surrounding Gunnar Myrdal’s book Asian Drama is used to position Tinbergen in the debates about development planning and neocolonialism. The critique of Myrdal’s book by anthropologist Clifford Geertz is used to contrast the way in which economic expertise developed in the Netherlands, and how it was imposed in former colonial countries by the international community. It is argued that an important set of preconditions such as social integration, broad political parties (people’s parties), and a strong civil society that made the success of economic expertise possible in the Netherlands were absent in many of the developing countries in which Tinbergen worked. The chapter concludes with an analysis of Tinbergen’s universalism, which had attractive moral features, but ran into limits as a program of economic policy.

Beyond questions of culture, other modes of explanation for the persistence of inequality in Africa have been similarly simplistic, whether they relate to the lack of (human) capital or the presence – indeed abundance and dependence – of natural capital and the resource curse (as this introduction tries to make clear). More systematic and comprehensive explanations need to be developed. Doing so must involve building new foundations, but the question is where to begin: How do we build the conceptual foundations for a new beginning and how can these be defended or reinforced against counter currents? When built, what sorts of arguments can they support? It is these questions that this chapter successively answers in three sections respectively examining the nature of the foundations that can be built for a new beginning, the aims, paradigm, and arguments of the book, and the overall planned structure of the book.

Polanyi–s and Galbraith–s analyses of very long-run changes in, and main characteristics of, economic and social structures. It is pointed out how neo-institutionalism is grounded in the traditional marginalist approach, thus sharing its limits, while the evolutionary and institutional approaches, with strong connections among them, are born in counterposition to the marginalist approach. Their contributions, in particular those to the analysis of technical change, are then illustrated. With reference mainly to Hirschman, the cultural element in development economics is recalled. A final section illustrates the –varieties of capitalism–.