Articles by Deena Khatkhate

Joan Robinson by G C Harcourt and Prue Kerr (London: Palgrave Macmillan), 2009; pp x+270, price not mentioned.

The Provocative Joan Robinson: The Making of a Cambridge Economist by Nahid Aslanbeigui and Guy Oakes (Durham and London: Duke University Press), 2009; pp xi+302, price not mentioned.

Windows of Opportunity: Memoirs of an Economic Adviser by K S Krishnaswamy; Orient BlackSwan in Association with Sameeksha Trust, Hyderabad, 2010; pp 190, Rs 440.


Reprise of the Canons of Development Economics Deena Khatkhate A fter the end of the second world war, two platforms for the eco- nomic debate, both among academics and policymakers occupied the centre stage. First was the reconstruction of the war-devastated economies of western Europe and, second, development of the former colonies. The first was a relatively simple affair without any need to conceptualise an analytic framework. All that was necessary was a mobilisation of resources, though of massive proportion, to uplift the war-ravaged industrialised economies on a growth trajectory. This was accomplished by a huge resource transfer from the richest country in the world, i e, the US. Since the basic foundation of capitalist enterprise was undamaged and skills of the surviving population to restore it remained intact, those economies revived with great speed and vibrancy and though the World Bank was set up with one of the objectives of helping that process, it played only a peripheral role. Instead the World Bank

With India's independence, new forces were unleashed; the period of negativism and imitativeness had come to an end. However, creativity in thinking was sadly missing. Sachin Chaudhuri's Economic Weekly was in a way therefore a historical necessity. Sachin questioned every premise, made others around him to do likewise, and provoked and prodded the younger ones to be restless, aspiring and to seek answers scientifically to the questions of the times. On the 60th anniversary of its launch, a handful of the many who were associated with EW and Sachin Chaudhuri during the 1950s and thereafter reminisce about the excitement surrounding the journal. These reminiscences will be published in EPW during the course of January. Here the first two essays.

This article focuses on the main issues vital for the survival of the International Monetary Fund in the context of rapid and almost revolutionary changes in the world's money and capital markets, the rise of fast growing, emerging economies, and the decline in the use of the institution's resources and consequently in its income. It also discusses the structure of the IMF, the inadequacy of the instruments it currently employs and the new ones being contemplated as part of the Medium-Term Strategy it designed recently.