Felix Vardy of the World Bank knows, I hope, of Lauchlin Currie's 
early work for the World Bank (beginning 1949) on the need to 
diversify away from primary production in Colombia, including the 
case for a dual exchange rate system for a hugely dominant export 
crop like coffee. Currie soon crossed swords with Albert Hirschman 
and other World Bank officials over subsequent plans for Colombia. 
This is fully documented in Michele Alacevich, _The World Bank and 
Development: The early years_ (Stanford U.P., 2009, forthcoming).

Currie's subsequent career as a top economic adviser in Latin America 
and his conflicts with the ECLA-Prebisch approach, is covered, for 
example, in his _Accelerating Development_ (McGraw-Hill, 1966) and 
many subsequent works (he died in 1993). He rejected the popular (and 
populist) Latin-American structuralist and 'dependencia' schools, 
along with the related Todaro thesis that there has been too much 
rural-urban migration.

For his alternative "leading sector" approach to the problem of 
excessive primary sector employment, see Ramesh Chandra, "Currie's 
'Leading Sector' Strategy of Growth: an appraisal", _Journal of 
Development Studies_, 42:3 (April 2006).

Roger Sandilands