Agricultural and Applied Economics—Without Apology
As I wrote about on Friday, this weekend was the inaugural meeting of the Midwest Group on African Political Economy (MGAPE), a group that aims at bringing together economists and political scientists working on development policy in Africa.
I am in College Station, TX tonight and tomorrow for the inaugural meeting of the Midwest Group on African Political Economy (MGAPE). The MGAPE is the brain child of Kim Yi Dionne (see her blog here, and her Twitter feed here) and is a sister organization to the Working Group on African Political Economy on the West Coast.
Esther Duflo, First Development Economist Ever? (Updated) (Updated)
From an article on Esther Duflo by
The Guardian‘sIPS News republished by The Guardian:“Doing her PhD at MIT, she was one of the first doctoral students to apply economics to development, linking the two, at a time when there were few university faculties devoted to the subject.”
I don’t mean to add to the considerable amount of snark (see here, for example) but… Really? In the first development economics class I ever took, back in the late 1990s, I was taught that the first article on development economics was Paul Rosenstein-Rodan’s “Problems of Industrialization of Eastern and Southeastern Europe,” which was published in the Economic Journal in 1943.
Could this mean that Esther Duflo was one of the first doctoral students to apply economics to development at MIT?
Even that is unlikely: the first development economics class I ever took was taught by Jean-Louis Arcand, who received his Ph.D. from MIT in 1991.
(Update: A community coordinator at The Guardian Global Development emailed me to draw my attention to the fact that this was originally a story by IPS News, which The Guardian republished.)
(Update: The author of the story comments on how the original story was quickly corrected on the website.)