Mauro wrote 'It is worth noting that, although  development economics 
emerged as a separate field in the 1940s and  1950s, the topic, of course, 
had attracted the attention of economists  long before that.'

He is, of course, quite right. Developing that point a bit further, what 
really happened in the mid twentieth century was a division (in syllabuses, 
textbooks and so on) between what was called development (in  so called 
underdeveloped countries) and growth (in developed countries, generally not 
explicitly so called because they were regarded as normal). So what really 
defined 'development' economics was the definition of a sub-set of 
countries to which it applied.

Incidentally, I have argued (HOPE 1995) that the idea of sustained economic 
growth was genuinely new with Turgot 1766, developed more fully by Smith 
1776, if you want an answer to the origin of the idea of economic 
development.

Tony Brewer [log in to unmask]