If 'human development' is to be part of this story, then the papal 
encyclicals Populorum Progressio (Paul VI, 1967) and Caritas in Veritate 
(Benedict XVI, 2009) are not without relevance. At least they show that 
the ideology of development affected even the Church of Rome in the 
second half of the 20th C.

Anthony Waterman


On 09/02/2011 10:33 AM, Flavio Comim wrote:
> Dear Sergio,
>
> I will answer your question at the end of my message (but before, if I 
> may, I will indulge into offering some comments about the very 
> interesting debate that you have incited):
>
> Development economists consider that the origin of the contemporary 
> concept of development was President's Truman 1949 speech ('the so 
> called Point Four'). That happens for two reasons. First, because he 
> proposed development in a broad international perspective organised 
> around aid and technical assistance (which are very much contemporary 
> features of development practises). Secondly, because he was able to 
> institutionalise development through the United Nations (think about 
> the theoretical contributions by UNDP, ILO, UNCTAD). Indeed, most of 
> what we call nowadays development cannot be seen without this 
> international perspective (think about MGDs, Climate Change, etc).
>
> It is true that Smith and Mill and Marx (to mention just a few) 
> discussed much earlier than the WWII phenomena that are associated 
> with development, broadly speaking. In fact, they talked about 
> 'progress' (either material or moral), but never within the Human 
> Rights framework adopted by the UN after Truman's speech 
> (institutional aspect). Some might argue that colonialist policies 
> were replaced by development policies and that the cold war produced 
> different streams (for the heterodoxy we could mention the Bandung 
> 1955 conference, quite important for defining 'underdevelopment' 
> followed by the New International Economic Order (NIEO) of the 60s and 
> the Prebish-Singer group). I would agree with that.
>
> But much followed after the 1950s and 1960s. A new world of 
> development economics started after Robert Mcnamara's address to the 
> board of governors of the World Bank in 1972 in which he talked about 
> poverty, inequality and basic needs. Professor Des Gasper has written 
> several papers on this subject. I understand that Sir Richard Jolly 
> has also done a great job in putting an intellectual history of the UN 
> together in several volumes that tell with details this story. They 
> might be useful references to your project.
>
> And then we have the human development perspective, that completed in 
> 2010 twenty years (based on the publication of the first Human 
> Development Report). Indeed, the last Human Development Report brings 
> a little bit of their history, but books by Mahbub ul Haq, Paul 
> Streeten and Amartya Sen (see the nice collection put together by 
> Sakiko Fukuda Parr some years ago with some of their contributions) 
> can situate much better what happened in the last twenty years.
>
> To conclude, my view is that unless you are interested in what 
> specific authors have said about development, I would not delve into 
> what economists said much earlier before the end of the WWII (Keynes 
> might be an exception). I am aware that my comment might not be very 
> popular and by no means I wish to suggest that the contrary comments 
> you have received earlier are not very interesting and valid as a 
> historical perspective to the subject, but I would focus on the 
> contemporary meaning of the term.
>
> And to answer your question, the best book I know on the topic is 'The 
> History of Development: from western origins to global faith' (London, 
> Zed Books, 2008 [was written earlier in French, but updated])
>
> Kind regards,
>
> Flavio
>
>
> Flavio Comim
> University of Cambridge, UK
> Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil
>
>