Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Figures
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 The Turn Away from Laissez-Faire
- 2 The Bolshevik Revolution and the Socialist Calculation Debate
- 3 The Roaring Twenties and Austrian Business Cycle Theory
- 4 The New Deal and Institutionalist Economics
- 5 The Great Depression and Keynes’s General Theory
- 6 The Second World War and Hayek’s Road to Serfdom
- 7 Postwar British Socialism and the Fabian Society
- 8 The Mont Pelerin Society and the Rebirth of Smithian Economics
- 9 The Postwar German “Wonder Economy” and Ordoliberalism
- 10 Indian Planning and Development Economics
- 11 Bretton Woods and International Monetary Thought
- 12 The Great Inflation and Monetarism
- 13 The Growth of Government
- 14 Free Trade, Protectionism, and Trade Deficits
- 15 From Pleasant Deficit Spending to Unpleasant Sovereign Debt Crisis
- Index
- References
10 - Indian Planning and Development Economics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Figures
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 The Turn Away from Laissez-Faire
- 2 The Bolshevik Revolution and the Socialist Calculation Debate
- 3 The Roaring Twenties and Austrian Business Cycle Theory
- 4 The New Deal and Institutionalist Economics
- 5 The Great Depression and Keynes’s General Theory
- 6 The Second World War and Hayek’s Road to Serfdom
- 7 Postwar British Socialism and the Fabian Society
- 8 The Mont Pelerin Society and the Rebirth of Smithian Economics
- 9 The Postwar German “Wonder Economy” and Ordoliberalism
- 10 Indian Planning and Development Economics
- 11 Bretton Woods and International Monetary Thought
- 12 The Great Inflation and Monetarism
- 13 The Growth of Government
- 14 Free Trade, Protectionism, and Trade Deficits
- 15 From Pleasant Deficit Spending to Unpleasant Sovereign Debt Crisis
- Index
- References
Summary
In 1958, on his first visit to India, the Hungarian-British development economist Peter Bauer was eager to meet the Indian economist B. R. Shenoy. Bauer knew the name from a “Note of Dissent on the Memorandum of the Economists’ Panel,” which Shenoy had written criticizing India’s Second Five-Year Plan. In 1955 the Indian government had recruited twenty-one senior Indian economists for the Panel of Economists, chaired by the minister of finance, to review the plan. Twenty of the economists had signed a memorandum endorsing the plan. Professor Shenoy was the lone dissenter. Shenoy’s “Note of Dissent” was an annoyance to members of the Indian Planning Commission; to Prime Minister Nehru, who had initiated the planning effort; to Nehru’s adviser P. C. Mahalanobis, who had drafted the plan; and even to international aid officials, who overwhelmingly supported the planning effort. Shenoy had become persona non grata in official economic policy-making circles. Bauer soon discovered this firsthand, as he later described:
I called on a senior officer of the economic section of the British High Commission [in New Delhi]. I asked him whether he or his colleagues were in any sort of contact with Shenoy. He said that people there were too busy to have time for acknowledged madmen…. I may add that at about the same time I visited the Delhi School of Economics and the National Council of Applied Economic Research. There also I found considerable and often not well founded disagreement with Shenoy’s views, but nothing like the disdain exhibited by this arrogant and ignorant mandarin at the High Commission.
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- Chapter
- Information
- The Clash of Economic IdeasThe Great Policy Debates and Experiments of the Last Hundred Years, pp. 246 - 274Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2012