2009/01/29 by James A. Robinson · 1 voice
Economics, Econometrics and Finance · #Economic Theory and Policy #Fiscal Policy and Economic Growth #Global Financial Crisis and Policies
paper · doi:10.1111/j.1468-0297.2008.02231.x
openalex publication_date 2009/01/29 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
Few people have had as much impact on our thinking about comparative development as Dani Rodrik has. Starting out mostly as a trade theorist, he made seminal contributions to the political economy of growth and reform, before more recently focusing in on a related set of topics whose main feature is a ‘heterodox’ interpretation of the comparative growth experience. One Economics, Many Recipes collects an inter‐related set of essays which lays out this interpretation and what he sees as its policy implications. The book is passionate and lucid and I was reminded of Karl Marx’s famous remark ‘the point is not to understand the world, but to change it’. I think Dani would agree. This heterodoxy was first sensed by the profession in his sustained empirical attack on the shibboleth that free trade and economic openness had an important causal role to play in stimulating economic growth. His ideas developed with his critique of the ‘Washington consensus’ approach to policy reform in developing countries. More than anyone, I think he was responsible for undermining the highly simplistic interpretations of the post‐war growth experience which were so dominant during the 1980s, particularly during the period when Anne Krueger and Deepak Lal exerted such influence at the World Bank. Though he built on work by non‐economists, such as Alice Amsden, Chalmers Johnson and Robert Wade, he saw that one did not need to reject economic principles to understand what had gone on, and it was this which gave his work such impact in economics. Time and time again he not only kept reminding us of how inconvenient the facts were but he also held on to the baby. While Amsden, for instance, saw the argument that South Korea had grown rich by ‘getting the prices wrong’, as a critical blow to the coherence of economic theory, Dani Rodrik pointed out that in an economy with many distortions it was good economics to deviate from market prices to shadow prices.