Paul Rosenstein-Rodan
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Paul Rosenstein-Rodan (1902-1985) was an Austrian economist born in Kraków, who was trained in the Austrian tradition at Vienna. His early contributions to economics were in pure economic theory - on marginal utility, complementarity, hierarchical structures of wants and the ever-Austrian issue of time.
Rosenstein-Rodan emigrated to Britain in 1930, and taught at UCL and then at LSE until 1947. He then moved to the World Bank, before moving on to MIT, where he was a professor from 1953 to 1968.
He was the author of a theory of the 'big push' in which he compared an underdeveloped economy to an airplane on a runway. An airplane, before it flies, has to gain a certain velocity in order to take off. Similarly, an economy was able to function along Adam Smith's free makret principles only when it gained momentum stimulated by planned large-scale investment programmes.
[edit] References
- John Martinussen, Society, State and Market: a guide to competing theories of development (Zed Books Ltd., 1997)
