Preface

The greater part of this book is a revised version of six lectures which I gave in Rio de Janeiro in July and August 1951 as a guest of the Brazilian Institute of Economics under the chairmanship of Professor Eugenio Gudin. A Portuguese translation of these lectures, with English and French summaries, appeared in the quarterly Revista Brasileira de Economia, December 1951.

I have incorporated a paper read at a symposium on ‘Growth in Underdeveloped Countries’ at the Boston meeting of the American Economic Association on December 29th, 1951, published in the American Economic Review, Papers and Proceedings, May 1952. I am indebted to Professors Arthur R. Burns, J. Marcus Fleming and Gottfried Haberler for some detailed criticism of this paper, which I have tried to take into account in the present fuller version.

Some of the material that has gone into this book was delivered before the Société d'économie politique in Cairo in April 1952 as part of a lecture programme of the National Bank of Egypt, on the initiative of Professor N. Koestner, chief of the bank's research department, and was printed by the bank for limited private distribution.

Even though the text has been revised and largely re-written, all traces of the lecture form in which the bulk of it first took shape can scarcely have been removed. The treatment is of necessity selective and cannot claim to give a balanced picture.