 So, first of all, of course, I would like to thank Wider for inviting me to make this presentation. But I also want to take just two minutes to express my very great gratitude to Fin Top. I feel that what he has achieved in his long term at Wider is simply incredible. Of course, I would echo the words of Jose Antonio. Wider has become the nucleus of the world center of development economics and to a large extent it is due to the leadership of a number of directors, but certainly Fin I think has played a wonderful role in getting wider where it is. And what I admire so much in Fin is that he's not only an extremely good administrator, he's a field man. It seems to me that most of the messages that I sent him over the last five, 10 years were answered from Hanoi, Mozambique, New York on the way to wherever. So Fin in a way represents a combination of qualities which are extremely important in development which is field experience, good knowledge of economic theory, interest in applications, in data, and good administrative skills. So thank you very much Fin for your leadership. So let me mention very quickly the content of my talk. I'll start with a preamble and a very brief review of some of my important contacts with people who were essentially giants in the field of economic development. And then I want to elaborate a number of themes. I'll start with African development, second theme, income distribution, inequality, and poverty. And the third team is economic structure into dependence and quantitative development economics. As I will mention in just a few minutes, I'm planning to write what is a semi-autobiographical booklet which will describe my journey through the history of development economics. So the first three themes I will be presenting here, but later on hopefully I will be able to complete the other themes which are pattern of world trade, globalization, role of agriculture and economic development, and structural transformation, employment and basic needs, and the role of institutions in economic development. So what was my motivation in writing my journey? I had recently completed a chapter in what is going to be a new handbook of development economics, which is co-edited by our chairman together with Machiko Nisanke on the history of the evolution of the development economics doctrine from 1950 to 2017. And it occurred to me that for a number of reasons, which you can see on the screen, my professional career overlapped pretty much with the period during which development economics existed. Development economics as a discipline really started, I would say, at the end of the Second World War. Second reason was that I was fortunate enough to have met and often collaborated with some of the giants in the field. And I thought perhaps that by reviewing some of my modest contributions, I could, by including some of the anecdotes, including some of the personal interactions with these giants in the field, enliven the narrative around the history of development economics. Now, hopefully, some younger researchers can learn something from my story and not all of the story is positive, as you will see. And of course, a disclaimer is in order at the outset, great humility is called for when you're going to go over your own journey. And I certainly beg your indulgence if you feel that there has been, on my part, a failure of being humble and a lack of modesty. My intention was certainly not to promote my modest contributions. I'm better aware than anybody else of the limitations of my own contributions. But I basically thought that this was a nice way of looking at development economics. One aspect of my contributions is that because of personal impatience, I never stayed with one field for a very long period of time. I would essentially go from one field with an economic development to another field and very often work on these different themes simultaneously. So let me first go through very quickly some of the influential experiences. I attended the Netherlands School of Economics 1947 to 51. I was a student of Tinbergen, but of course at that time I didn't know him. In those days when the professor came into the room, every student had to stand up and the distance between professors and students was enormous. Later, I'm going to say a few words about Tinbergen as an individual. He was the first Nobel Laureate in economics, which is quite an achievement, because at that time the whole pool of economists was available to choose from and the fact that he was the first one I think is significant. I attended the University of California from 52 to 57. I worked with Professor Kondliff, who had been a professor at LSE, had just written a book on the commerce of nations, which was at that time becoming a classic. He represented really a view of economics that was the more literary view and I was also attracted to the more quantitative side and so I enjoyed Dorfmann, Leibnstein, Irma Edelman was a classmate of mine and as you will see later on I worked fairly closely with Irma on a number of projects. Very early on in my career I presented a paper, this was at SMU, and Gottfried Haberlin was in the audience and he was extremely complimentary. He invited me to present a paper at the AEA meeting and so my first published paper appeared in the AER, which was unusual at that time. My first job was at, I was State University and I was greatly influenced by Karl Fox and Gerhard Tintner, who was one of the founders of Econometrica. Then I had a staying at the National Planning Institute in Lima that I will describe. In the 60s I worked very closely with Hollis Chendery and Gus Reines at USAID. I had something to do with the creation of the Development Research Center at the World Bank. Then later on I spent a few years at the ILO in Geneva with the World Employment Program. Matt Graham-Pyatt started working on a new methodology, which is the social accounting matrix, trying to include basic needs and poverty into the SAM framework. I worked later with Paul Streeton, something to do with world development, again I'll mention something of it. When I joined Cornell I shared for many years the program on comparative economic development and collaborated with many of my colleagues. Most of them are here today, Koshlik, Ravi, Gary, and a number of others. Later on I was invited to write a white paper by Harris Moulet, who was the permanent secretary of the Treasury in Kenya on basic needs and poverty in Kenya. That essentially started my work in Africa. Subsequently, for a long period of time I had contact with the OECD Development Center, Ian Little, Christian Morison, and so on. Then the last 25 years I've worked very closely with the African Economic Research Consortium. More recently, Finn had invited me to be active in the Nordic Development Association. I had one big collaborative project with wider on the impact of globalization on the world poor. Let me start with the first theme. As many of the presenters at this meeting have indicated, there has been a quantum jump in GDP in Africa, essentially from zero per capita GDP growth rate to something like 2.5%, 3% after 2000. There is some evidence that this growth has been more inclusive, not sufficiently inclusive, but more inclusive than it had been in the past. One of the things that I tried to do in the paper was to look at some of the contributions that were made by distinguished researchers based on the African setting, the African initial conditions. Again, you can look at it very quickly. The Hewister-Darrow model, Joe's efficiency wage theory, the informal sector, baits, urban bias, the enclave economies, and so on, including the FGT measure that was conceived in Kenya, but really born at Cornell. Let me tell you how I really became involved in a deep sense in African development. In 1994, there was a conference in Paris at the OECD Development Center entitled What Future for Africa? They had asked me to write a paper with an African colleague, a student of mine, and essentially we argued that there were two very different approaches to development. One was the World Bank, IMF, a very hard-nosed, conditionality-based approach, and the kind of adjustment with the human face strategy promoted by UNICEF. Paul Collier was a discussant and was extremely critical of my ambivalence, essentially saying there's only one approach, which is the IMF World Bank approach, broses everything. And as I mentioned to him at that time, it came as a real cold shower. I wasn't ready for it, and it reminded the time that I was a border at the International School in Geneva, and at seven o'clock in the morning, all of the borders had to take cold shower, and for five minutes, this was quite painful. Now, I must admit that prior to that conference, my involvement with Africa had been limited, but it was not non-existent. I had done some work in the what was I hear at that time on corruption. I had done some work on Kenya, but clearly I wasn't an African expert. And it was very surprising that Beno Nodulo, who at that time was the executive director of the AARC, approached me and invited me to evaluate the research program of the AARC. And in all modesty, I perhaps can claim that I have now become a Bonafide African development expert. So perhaps I should be thankful to Paul Collier for the cold shower. So very quickly, what are some of my modest contributions to African development? One of my major recommendations in the evaluation of the research and training program of the AARC at that time was that it was inexcusable not to have a poverty theme in the continent with where poverty was endemic. So I think one of the things that I did achieve was to promote the need for poverty analysis. I also helped organize a number of training workshops with leading scholars. Martin Ravellian was one of the trainers at one of these workshops, but we had really the leading poverty analysts available to train the Africans. And I would estimate that we probably trained something like 150 African economists in this methodology. Subsequently, again through the AARC, we initiated a number of collaborative projects, one of which I think was very successful. And it involved a number of universities, which you can see Cornell was the lead institution, but Copenhagen, Gartenberg, Laval, Oxford, CRD. And it led to a modality which many of the younger African scholars and some of them in the meantime have become quite distinguished have called twinning. And twinning meant that networks or teams of Africans from a country would come and spend as long as maybe three months with an institution in order to learn about poverty analysis, learn about software packages, the handling of large-scale surveys. And some of the leading young and maybe not so young development economists such as Murray Lebrant, Haroon Borat, Germano Moabu, did come to Cornell or to other institutions and feel that this type of twinning was very useful. Okay, so now in terms of research, very quickly, I worked on the anatomy of growth in Africa, trying to understand better the Bourguignon Triangle, the interrelationships among growth inequality and poverty. I try to analyze the changing structure of growth. And if I may disagree in a very gently way with Ernest's presentation yesterday, I feel that his diagnosis was perhaps a little bit too pessimistic in 12 of the 14 countries that I examine. I do find evidence of structural transformation that was successful in the sense that the workers moving out of agriculture would find jobs outside of agriculture where the wages were higher, where they were more productive. Now granted, this wasn't in industry, it was essentially in services, but it shows some structural change in the right direction. Did some work on poverty convergence? I have a paper coming out where I extend the dataset used by Martin Ravellian by something like six to eight years. And we essentially confirm his results, but what we find and granted it's a limited sample, but what we find is that in sub-Saharan Africa, largely I think because of the role of private aid, the Gates Foundation, the allocation of aid was such that it benefited the poor countries as well as the poor segments within countries more than the non-poor and in this way we do find evidence of some poverty convergence within Africa. So anyway, I was recently at the African Development Institute at Cornell and the AERC organized a symposium in my modest honor and I was very pleased and of course I hope you forgive me for putting this on the screen, but if you read it, it does mention that my work on Africa did make some difference and my reward was to see the improvement and the quality of the research of the younger Africans. Over 25-year periods, I've been very impressed by this improvement. Okay, let me move very quickly to the second topic, income distribution, inequality and poverty and I'm starting with two quotes, one by an atheist and one essentially a Christian. Marx held that politics is determined by economics and imagined that what people most desire is to grow rich experience since this time has shown that there's something which people desire even more strongly and that is to keep others poor. There's some truth to it and then of course the question view is the one who had much did not have too much and the one who had little did not have too little. So I must say that it was my Peruvian experience in the 60s under an Alliance for Progress project that made me a development economist. I was working on agrarian reforms and income distribution between the major regions of Peru and the as you can see the genicoefficient of land distribution was something like 0.88 and I was really facing a moral conflict because on the one hand the project that had been instituted by USAID called for the training of Peruvian students in economics and many of my students came from families of oligarchs so we would be invited to these wonderful parties. I remember meeting Miss Universe at one of the parties. I remember some of the parents of my students going to Paris to buy designer clothes over the weekend and the moral conflict I was facing was on the one hand I enjoyed this kind of life on the other hand I felt that it was quite inequitable and that's when I decided that I would devote my life to development economics. Let me just mention a very funny interaction with Robert Mundell another Nobel Prize laureate. He came and visited Peru at that time and he was an early advocate of monetarism and at that time I had been working on a model of Peru where growth was export led and he said you know I don't believe in in all this multiply your kind of analysis why don't you just use a money supply increase the money supply and that's going to contribute to growth and I said yes but I that assumes that the velocity of circulation of money is pretty much constant and I don't believe that and he said well check it so I got the data at that time you had very few data and to my great surprise I found that indeed V had remained totally constant over a 10-year period and it's only later on that I found the reason for this I talked to an economist at the central bank who said the way we estimate GNP is by multiplying the money supply by a constant velocity of circulation so that taught me something about reverse causality. Poverty I think it was probably my the white paper that I wrote for the Kenyan government that forced me to face the issue of apprehending and measuring poverty and essentially this led to the the beginning of the FGT measure and if I I've had very few creative moments in my career but I think I had one creative moment after having heard Sen visited Cornell and at that time his the gold standard among poverty measure was Sen's ordinal poverty measure basically the poorest household let's say the the the poorest household was given a weight of N the next force N minus 1 and so on and I felt this was essentially arbitrary because you have a an infinite number of possible distributions that meet this this ordinal ordering so essentially I said well why not take the distance from the poverty line as the actual mean and this led to what became P2 the poverty squared poverty measure now the formalization of the FGT of course could never have occurred without the help of James Foster who in the meantime has become a distinguished theorist but I think it was a it was a work of love and it's an example where team research the complementarity between different skills makes it possible to come up with a concept that is new I was very humbled when the Mexican constitution was amended this was in 1999 to use P2 as a decision rule in the allocation of central government funds to the provinces in a number of fields including education nutrition and health so let me move very quickly to my third theme on economic structure interdependence I was influenced by Tin Bergen and I just want to say a few words about Tin Bergen. Tin Bergen was one of the most courteous individuals I've ever met and later on after I had emigrated to the US he was extremely nice to me quite a few times he would invite me to lunch and it was a very formal lunch him and his wife and a maid in black attire white bonnets and as a very timid economy young economist at that time I really have had very little to offer in the in the conversation but I was a good listener and later on I heard this was a signal honor a few people were invited to lunch another thing I remember about Tin Bergen was whenever uh he invited me to his office the first thing I would see on his desk was a timer and the timer was always set for 20 minutes and regardless of where you were in a conversation you might be in the middle of a sentence when the timer rang this was a time to go and he would get up shake your hand and say how pleased he was to have met you one of the the most organized person I've ever met and I've always wondered if the time allocated to individuals was a function of the reputation of the individual I don't know but I know that I was given 20 minutes in those days planning was a good word not a bad word and and many people forget I think some of the success of planning the the Dutch social economic council consisted of representatives of employers organizations managers and the crown the crown being the government and they would set the goals in terms of economic growth maximum inflation share of gnp going to labor as opposed to capital and it's really worked beautifully for I would say almost a 10-year period so perhaps there's a lesson to learn that strategic planning in this day and age still has a an important place I know I'm running out of time so let me very quickly again emphasize a few points in in the mid 60s together with Erma Edelman I organized a conference on the theory and design of economic development with which was attended by leaders in the in the field and the book that came out was probably the first textbook in development economics I cannot vouch for it but I do remember that many development courses at that time did use it as a as a textbook one area that always interested me was to expand the dual economy framework and one of the things that I did with many of my students was to expand it into dual dual models and by this I mean that I would distinguish not only between rural which is essentially agriculture and urban which is essentially non-agriculture but also between modern and traditional technologies and forms of organization and that gives you four sectors rather than two and I think it very often is a more accurate description of the initial conditions I was very active at the beginning of the ILO world employment program many people have forgotten that the basic needs doctrine was initiated within the world employment program and then taken over by the the World Bank it was very serendipitous that I met grand pious I he taught me about the SAM started working with him we wrote this book on planning techniques for a better future we incorporated basic needs poverty into the same into the SAM framework I met Richard Stone at a Cambridge conference some of the people there felt this was a very transformative meeting then I expanded the the SAM to Indonesia over a 10-year period we had a team of the Institute of Social Studies in the Netherlands and Cornell working with the Central Statistical Bureau in Indonesia it became essentially institutionalized and later on after the financial crisis the Asian financial crisis I together with another student of mine E1 Aziz we merged a financial SAM with a real SAM and looked at the impact of the IMF recommendations at that time that had been devastating on the Indonesian economy and one year GDP fell by 14 percent and that was really based on extremely high interest rate which starved liquidity for the whole country so we used the CGE model to simulate alternative scenarios and we found that somewhat different policies could have much more desirable outcomes together with David Stifle we built an arch type African country SAM and CGE and then finally last thing I'm going to say is again I was very happy but also humbled that Walter Eisard who is a father of regional science when he was I think 75 came to see me and he said you know I'm a student of Leontief and I know all about input output can you teach me the SAM so I would spend hours with Walter trying to teach him the SAM he was a very quick learner he became an advocate of the SAM and this led to a book which now is perhaps a bible in regional science so thank you very much for your patience and indulgence into what has been a long journey and I hope it's not over yet