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The use of global abstractions: national income accounting in the period of imperial decline

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 February 2011

Daniel Speich
Daniel Speich
Affiliation:
Institute for History, ETH Zurich, ADM B 5, ETH Zentrum, CH-8092 Zurich, Switzerland E-mail: speich@history.gess.ethz.ch
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Abstract

This article explores the history of a conceptual world economic order of nations created by statistically minded economists over the last seventy years. Drawing upon work by Colin Clark, Richard Stone, and Simon Kuznets from the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, it reconstructs the rise of new economic indicators referring to economic inequality. Two forms of intellectual practice can be identified that characterized a remarkable shift in knowledge production in Anglo-American economics in the period of French and British imperial decline. One was new methods of counting and comparing income, which produced a sensational new view of the world as a place of enormous poverty. The other was the belief that these issues could be solved by applying a limited set of policy recommendations to all economies in the world.

Keywords

development historyeconomic historyhistory of decolonizationhistory of economic thoughthistory of national income accounting
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Global History , Volume 6 , Issue 1 , March 2011 , pp. 7 - 28
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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71 Kuznets, ‘International differences’, p. 10.

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82 Chidzero, ‘United Nations Economic Commission’.

83 Richard M. Barkay, ‘The statistical macro-economic framework needed in development planning in Africa’, in Samuels, African Studies, p. 85. I thank Mary S. Morgan for bringing this quote to my attention.

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86 Peter J. Boettke, ed., The collapse of development planning, The collapse of development planning: New York University Press, 1994.

87 It is interesting to note that these benchmarks created an incentive for underdeveloped countries to keep their official national income figures low: Vernon, ‘Politics’, p. 65.

88 Carl E. Pletsch, ‘The three worlds, or the division of social scientific labor, circa 1950–1975’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 23, 4, 1981, pp. 565–90.

89 Mary Morgan, ‘Perspective: making measuring instruments’, in Klein and Morgan, The age, pp. 235–51.

90 The limitations of national sovereignty in the postcolonial world order are analysed in Antony Anghie, Imperialism, sovereignty and the making of international law, Imperialism, sovereignty and the making of international law: Cambridge University Press, 2004.