IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/rherxx/v67y2017i1p2-25.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Trevor Swan and Indian Planning: The Lessons of 1958/59

Author

Listed:
  • Selwyn Cornish
  • Raghbendra Jha

Abstract

Trevor Swan is commonly considered to be Australia’s most distinguished economist. As part of a visiting professorship at MIT during 1958–59 he spent nine months in India to assist in the formulation of India’s third five-year plan and to contribute to the development of India’s premier research institutions. This paper provides an account of his work in New Delhi. Swan’s closest associates were Pitambar Pant from the Indian Planning Commission and Ian Little who was visiting from Oxford. Swan had the view that India’s economic problems should be clearly understood and the best policy measures to address them should be devised. This varied considerably from the practice of central planning and state control being practiced in India at that time. Swan was unable to influence the direction of economic policy in India, but the economy’s subsequent performance would vindicate Swan’s views on how economic development policy should have been conducted.

Suggested Citation

  • Selwyn Cornish & Raghbendra Jha, 2017. "Trevor Swan and Indian Planning: The Lessons of 1958/59," History of Economics Review, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 67(1), pages 2-25, May.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:rherxx:v:67:y:2017:i:1:p:2-25
    DOI: 10.1080/10370196.2017.1340080
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/10370196.2017.1340080
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/10370196.2017.1340080?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version below or

    for a different version of it.

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. N. A. Sarma, 1958. "Economic Development in India: The First and Second Five Year Plans," IMF Staff Papers, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 6(2), pages 180-238, April.
    2. Murphy, Kevin M & Shleifer, Andrei & Vishny, Robert W, 1989. "Industrialization and the Big Push," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 97(5), pages 1003-1026, October.
    3. Jagdish N. Bhagwati & T. N. Srinivasan, 1975. "Foreign Trade Regimes and Economic Development: India," NBER Books, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc, number bhag75-1, July.
    4. Robert M. Solow, 1956. "A Contribution to the Theory of Economic Growth," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 70(1), pages 65-94.
    5. T. W. Swan, 1956. "ECONOMIC GROWTH and CAPITAL ACCUMULATION," The Economic Record, The Economic Society of Australia, vol. 32(2), pages 334-361, November.
    6. Robert W. Dimand & Barbara J. Spencer, 2009. "Trevor Swan and the Neoclassical Growth Model," History of Political Economy, Duke University Press, vol. 41(5), pages 107-126, Supplemen.
    7. Dudley Seers, 1962. "Why Visiting Economists Fail," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 70(4), pages 325-325.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Gancia, Gino & Zilibotti, Fabrizio, 2005. "Horizontal Innovation in the Theory of Growth and Development," Handbook of Economic Growth, in: Philippe Aghion & Steven Durlauf (ed.), Handbook of Economic Growth, edition 1, volume 1, chapter 3, pages 111-170, Elsevier.
    2. Xavier Sala-i-Martin, 1990. "Lecture Notes on Economic Growth(I): Introduction to the Literature and Neoclassical Models," NBER Working Papers 3563, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    3. Durlauf, Steven N. & Quah, Danny T., 1999. "The new empirics of economic growth," Handbook of Macroeconomics, in: J. B. Taylor & M. Woodford (ed.), Handbook of Macroeconomics, edition 1, volume 1, chapter 4, pages 235-308, Elsevier.
    4. Mohammad Sharif Karimi & Andrzej Cieslik, 2017. "Foreign Knowledge Spillovers and Total Factor Productivity Growth: Evidence from Four ASEAN Countries," Iranian Economic Review (IER), Faculty of Economics,University of Tehran.Tehran,Iran, vol. 21(2), pages 267-299, Spring.
    5. Laurent Cellarier & Richard Day, 2011. "Structural instability and alternative development scenarios," Journal of Population Economics, Springer;European Society for Population Economics, vol. 24(3), pages 1165-1180, July.
    6. Markus Eberhardt & Francis Teal, 2011. "Econometrics For Grumblers: A New Look At The Literature On Cross‐Country Growth Empirics," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 25(1), pages 109-155, February.
    7. Rainer Klump & Peter McAdam & Alpo Willman, 2012. "The Normalized Ces Production Function: Theory And Empirics," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 26(5), pages 769-799, December.
    8. Markus Eberhardt & Francis Teal, 2010. "Aggregation versus Heterogeneity in Cross-Country Growth Empirics," CSAE Working Paper Series 2010-32, Centre for the Study of African Economies, University of Oxford.
    9. Nowak-Lehmann D., Felicitas, 2000. "Was there endogenous growth in Chile (1960 - 1998)? A test of the AK-model," University of Göttingen Working Papers in Economics 7, University of Goettingen, Department of Economics.
    10. Voosholz, Frauke, 2014. "A survey on modeling economic growth. With special interest on natural resource use," CAWM Discussion Papers 69, University of Münster, Münster Center for Economic Policy (MEP).
    11. Kadigi, Reuben M.J. & Robinson, Elizabeth & Szabo, Sylvia & Kangile, Joseph & Mgeni, Charles P. & De Maria, Marcello & Tsusaka, Takuji & Nhau, Brighton, 2022. "Revisiting the Solow-Swan model of income convergence in the context of coffee producing and re-exporting countries in the world," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 115636, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    12. Roger Fouquet & Ralph Hippe, 2022. "Twin Transitions of Decarbonisation and Digitalisation: A Historical Perspective on Energy and Information in European Economies," Working Papers 08-22, Association Française de Cliométrie (AFC).
    13. Debayan Pakrashi & Paul Frijters, 2017. "Takeoffs, Landing, and Economic Growth," ADBI Working Papers 641, Asian Development Bank Institute.
    14. Long, N.V. & Wong, K.Y., 1996. "Endogenous Growth and International Trade: A Survey," Working Papers 96-07, University of Washington, Department of Economics.
    15. Gordon Menzies, 2018. "A Synthesis of the Lewis Development Model and Neoclassical Trade Models," Working Paper Series 46, Economics Discipline Group, UTS Business School, University of Technology, Sydney.
    16. Fuchs-Schündeln, N. & Hassan, T.A., 2016. "Natural Experiments in Macroeconomics," Handbook of Macroeconomics, in: J. B. Taylor & Harald Uhlig (ed.), Handbook of Macroeconomics, edition 1, volume 2, chapter 0, pages 923-1012, Elsevier.
    17. Keller, Michael, 2022. "Oil revenues vs domestic taxation: Deeper insights into the crowding-out effect," Resources Policy, Elsevier, vol. 76(C).
    18. Hakenes, Hendrik & Irmen, Andreas, 2008. "Neoclassical growth and the "trivial" steady state," Journal of Macroeconomics, Elsevier, vol. 30(3), pages 1097-1103, September.
    19. Minea, Alexandru, 2008. "The Role of Public Spending in the Growth Theory Evolution," Journal for Economic Forecasting, Institute for Economic Forecasting, vol. 5(2), pages 99-120, June.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • B19 - Schools of Economic Thought and Methodology - - History of Economic Thought through 1925 - - - Other
    • B31 - Schools of Economic Thought and Methodology - - History of Economic Thought: Individuals - - - Individuals
    • O10 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - General
    • O21 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Development Planning and Policy - - - Planning Models; Planning Policy

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:rherxx:v:67:y:2017:i:1:p:2-25. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/rher .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.