Developing Economics

Celine Tan and Paul Gilbert* 2026 has brought the urgency of just transitions to the fore across different registers. This year has witnessed the capitals of global finance and postcolonial economic expansion in Europe and North America face unprecedented heatwaves and droughts. The US-Israel war on Iran continues to choke shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz and disrupt oil and gas production in the Gulf states.

Lima, 1949 – Mexico City, 2026 Isabel Ortiz Some deaths you never quite manage to take in, and this is one of them. Óscar Ugarteche was so alive, so strong, so brimming with intelligence and energy, that it seems impossible he died this past Saturday 11th of July. Born in Peru, he died far from his own country, in Mexico City, the place that took him in for his last twenty years and that, became a kind of exile.

C.P. Chandrasekhar Read the Full Article at IDEAs website Webinar 2 Link https://www.youtube.com/live/f0xW7fIGNEY When in 2017 the world marked the centenary of the Bolshevik seizure of power on 7 November 1917, many were unwilling to celebrate the economic achievements of the system that the revolution put in place. Soviet socialism was a failed system, they argued—one that did not work, leading finally to its collapse.

Webinar 1: Why Revisit National Planning Prabhat Patnaik. Download full Paper at IDEAs Website The case for ‘planning’, in the sense of a co-ordinated set of policies to realise, at least in some key sectors, certain magnitudes of investment and output-growth, remains as strong today for developing countries wishing to achieve economic and social transformation, as it ever was. There are at least three reasons for this.

Webinar 1: Why Revisit National Planning C.P. Chandrasekhar Download Full Paper at IDEAs Website The term “development planning” gained ascendancy in the period immediately after the Second World War, when decolonisation led to the emergence of a number of newly independent underdeveloped countries.

By Debolina Majumder and Michaela Collord Across the Global South, cities, and city-regions are growing fast, drawing attention to questions of urban development and its place in contemporary processes of capitalist development. But development for whom? By whom? These are pressing questions amidst growing (urban) inequalities. They are all the more preoccupying given widespread assumptions that urban labouring classes remain weak and, in many instances, ‘surplus’ to the needs of capital.

In Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls, the peasant appears twice dead. First in life, as property; then in death, as inventory lingering in the bureaucratic ledgers of the empire. Pavel Chichikov, Gogol’s wandering con man, traverses provincial Russia purchasing the names of deceased serfs still counted in the census so he can accumulate fictive wealth from human absence.

In September 2025, Adam Tooze sent a shock wave through Development studies circles (in the West) with an essay entitled “The End of Development”. He declared the evident truth that “the West’s aid model was always a mirage” and that “the UN Sustainable Development Goals now look less like a new dawn than the final gasp of a unipolar, end-of-history fantasy”. Yet, so-called ‘development’ speaks to more than aid and Western dominance.

Industrial policy, once a taboo in mainstream economics, is being mainstreamed by the very institutions that spent four decades stigmatising it. In March 2026, the World Bank published Industrial Policy for Development: Approaches in the 21st Century, co-authored by Ana Margarida Fernandes and Tristan Reed.

What actually constitutes the key agenda for workers in Indonesia beyond celebrating May Day as a symbol of struggle? Wages in Indonesia are never truly “negotiated”; they are determined, stabilized, and at the same time separated from the political power that should be able to challenge them.