Development Process: A Manual or a Collection of Anecdotes?

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Acknowledgements

I thank V. R. Muraleedharan and Jessica Seddon for their comments on an earlier draft and Akshaya Ayyangar and Aparna Ananthakrishnan for administrative assistance.

T. N. Srinivasan is a Samuel C. Park Jn Professor of Economics Emeritus and Emeritus Professor of International Area Studies, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA. Currently, he is an Honorary Visiting Professor at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India.

Notes

1. The figures are the difference between the average yearly rates of growth of GDP and GDP per capita in Drèze and Sen (2013, Table 1.1).

2. See also Bhagwati and Desai (1970), Bhagwati and Srinivasan (1975), Bhagwati and Panagariya (2013), and Srinivasan (2000, 2011). It so happens that I had requested Sen to comment on the draft of Srinivasan (2011). He excused himself. Interestingly, Bhagwati and Panagariya wrote glowing blurbs for the book although they apparently forgot it soon after!

3. It is arguable whether such an exercise is feasible given the limitations of the data. But the authors do not even consider exploring one.

4. The authors use the World Bank's World Development Indicators as their source of data. The World Bank does not itself gather much of the national data reproduced by it nor does it assess their comparability across countries and over time. For issues on the quality of the data, one has to go to the primary sources, which are more often than not the national statistical offices.

5. My criticism is of uncritical use of data that are uncertain due to measurement errors and biases. It is not a counsel of nihilism that nothing useful can be inferred from such data. For a constructive discussion of the issue and suggestions as to how to proceed, see Manski (2013).