Writing the History of Development Economics
探讨发展经济学作为独立学科的定义问题，以1950年代平衡增长与非平衡增长之争为例，分析该学科的核心争议及其历史演变。
This question, apparently unproblematic, has been at the center of the development discourse for decades now. Indeed, the first major debate that shaped the discipline-the 1950s balanced-growth versus unbalanced-growth debate-was fought under the rubric of what actually defined development economics as a distinct disciplinary field. Albert Hirschman (1958, 51) famously criticized the theory of balanced growth, whose principal authors he identified in Paul Rosenstein-Rodan, Ragnar Nurkse, and Tibor Scitovsky, on the ground that the theory failed "as a theory of development." As Hirschman put it, Development presumably means the process of change of one type of economy into some other more advanced type. But such a process is given up as hopeless by the balanced growth theory which finds it difficult to visualize how the "underdevelopment" equilibrium can be broken into at any point. . . . The balanced growth theory reaches the conclusion that an entirely new, self-contained modern industrial economy must be superimposed on the stagnant and equally self-contained traditional sector. . . . This is not growth, it is not even the grafting of something new onto something old; it is a perfectly dualistic pattern of development. (51)(52)