Development policy runs on theories about why some places are poor, and most of them are argued about without anybody drawing what they actually claim. Each entry here is one theory turned into a diagram you can step through, placed on four axes with the reason for each placement, and then set against the record: what it predicted, what happened, and what is still open.
Global canon and South Asian traditions in one catalogue, so that Rostow and Nehru, or Ambedkar and Gandhi, can be read side by side rather than in separate literatures.
M. K. Gandhi, J. C. Kumarappa
An economy should be organised around the village as a largely self-sufficient unit producing for local need with local labour, because centralised industrial production concentrates power, displaces the labour of a country that has labour to spare, and cannot be sustained by everyone.
B. R. Ambedkar
Caste is a division of labourers rather than of labour, held in place by endogamy and by religious sanction, and no economic programme that leaves it standing will reach the people at the bottom of it.
Raúl Prebisch, Hans Singer, Andre Gunder Frank, Samir Amin
Poor countries are not behind rich ones on the same road; they are poor because of the way they are joined to rich ones, and the terms of that connection get worse over time.
W. Arthur Lewis
A poor country holds a reserve of labour whose withdrawal from farming costs almost no output, so a modern sector can expand for decades at a flat wage, and everything the expansion earns above that wage is available to reinvest.
P. C. Mahalanobis, Jawaharlal Nehru
In an economy that cannot count on importing machines, the long-run growth rate is set by how much of today's investment goes into making machines rather than consumer goods, so the plan should hold consumption down and build heavy industry first.
W. W. Rostow
Every society passes through the same five stages on the way to a modern economy, and the one that matters is a short take-off in which investment roughly doubles as a share of national income.
Chandi Prasad Bhatt, Sunderlal Bahuguna, Gaura Devi, Ramachandra Guha, Vandana Shiva
Environmental conflict in a poor country is a distributional fight over who may use a resource that people live on, not a contest between growth and nature, and the people defending the resource are usually its poorest users.
Amartya Sen, Mahbub ul Haq, Martha Nussbaum
Development should be measured by what people are actually able to do and to be, because income and even goods say nothing about what a particular person can convert them into.
Pranab Bardhan
India's industrial stagnation was not a planning error but the predictable output of a state serving three propertied groups, none strong enough to rule and all strong enough to be paid off, so public money went into subsidies rather than investment.
John Williamson
Poor countries are poor because prices are distorted by their own governments, so the sequence is to close the fiscal gap, let prices find their level, open to trade and investment, and get the state out of production.
Douglass North, Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, James Robinson
Differences in income between countries are caused by differences in the rules governing property, entry and power, and those rules were largely set long ago by whether a place was settled or extracted from.
Esther Duflo, Abhijit Banerjee, Michael Kremer
Grand theories of development cannot be tested, but specific questions about specific programmes can be, by assigning them at random and comparing, and enough answered small questions is a better guide to policy than any answered large one.
Nothing matches that combination. .
Catalogues of political thought usually sort on a left-to-right axis. That axis sorts Indian thought badly: it puts Ambedkar and Nehru far apart while they share most of their economics, and it has nowhere to put Gandhi at all. These four ask questions that the theories on this shelf actually disagree about.
When resources have to be directed somewhere, does the theory trust planners or prices to do it?
Does the theory hold that the pie must be enlarged before it can be shared, or that the sharing is the point and cannot wait?
Does the theory treat caste, gender and race as forces that generate outcomes on their own, or as effects that dissolve once the economics is fixed? This axis replaces the left-right axis such catalogues usually carry, which sorts Indian thought badly: Ambedkar and Lohia sit far from Nehru on it while sharing much of his economics.
Who does the theory cast as the agent of change: organised people, or planners, economists and administrators?
The four scores are editorial. They run from -3 to +3, they were assigned by the ImpactMojo editorial team from the theory's own texts, and each theory page shows the sentence that justifies its placement so the placement can be argued with. They are a way of arranging a shelf, not a measurement.
Give a group two theories that contrast, one from the global canon and one from South Asia, and have them find the sentence in each that the other would refuse. The disagreement is usually not about facts and usually not about values either; it is about which mechanism is doing the work, which is what the diagrams are for.
The evidence section on each page is deliberately unkind to the theory it belongs to, including the ones we find persuasive. If you reproduce a diagram or the evidence, credit ImpactMojo. If you reproduce a theory, credit the person who thought of it, which each page names.
