Net Resource Outflow

The contribution of Joan Robinson during her stay in Princely India in the second half of the 1920s has two important aspects. Her treatment of the general considerations of the question of economic and financial relations between British India and Princely India serves as an indication of her early insights into the issues of underdevelopment and development in colonial India. Part II dealt with this aspect. Part III finds, on the basis of the case formulated in the study on India—The British Crown and the Indian States—for a return flow of resources from British India to the princely states, that both Robinsons thought and, in terms of policy, recommended prescriptions like modern applied development economists about a decade and a half before the birth of development economics and two decades before the first World Bank adviser set foot in an underdeveloped country. The case was made on the basis of estimates by using whatever passed in the name of statistics in the princely states or by making intelligent guesses, an experience that most early development economists would go through in countries with inadequate or no data at all.