An Informal Classical Model of the Current Economic Development Problem

Throughout most of the period since the end of the Second World War, one of Jan Tinbergen’s prime professional interests has been with the promotion of the economic development of the poorer parts of the world, and particularly with the development and application of models for the projection and planning of manpower utilisation. Recently, the Pearson Report has called attention, among other things, to a range of serious problems confronting the global development effort in the next decade. These include the population explosion, the growing problem of urban unemployment, a concern about the inappropriateness of western industrial technology to the conditions of relative abundance of labour and scarcity of capital in the developing countries and a complementary emphasis on the need to develop more appropriate technologies, and the judgment that the promotion of economic development as so far practiced has produced increasing, or at least no lessening, inequality in the distribution of income and wealth, with serious effects, actual in some cases and potentially ominous in many others, on the political stability necessary for modernisation and orderly economic development.