Developing Economics

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.

Somewhere in the state of Maharashtra, a cotton farmer took his own life after years of compounding debt and crop failure. Across India, this tragedy is not rare. The National Crime Records Bureau recorded 11,290 farmer and farm-labourer suicides in 2022—roughly one death every hour—with debt consistently identified as a leading cause (Down to Earth, 2023).

By Farwa Sial and C.P. Chandrasekhar Private credit markets are showing real signs of stress, with multiple major funds restricting withdrawals as investors struggle to exit illiquid holdings.

For the better part of two decades, development economics has been held captive by a ‘clinical’ revolution. What began as a niche statistical tool has, through a masterclass in institutional branding, been elevated to the undisputed ‘Gold Standard’ of economic science. We are told a heartwarming tale of ‘Nobel laureates caring about poverty’, a narrative where the ‘bottom billion’ are finally being saved by the rigorous, scientific tinkering of MIT and Harvard.