| Summary: | [Excerpt from introduction.] The essays and chapters submitted here are concerned with the relation between ideas about development and ways of measuring it. They do not have the monographic consistency of a Ph.D. thesis since they were written over a period of 30 years. But I believe that they represent a set of pertinent and relatively consistent interventions in important debates, most of which are continuing. The questions with which they are concerned are relatively constant; the answers less so. This partly reflects reconsideration on the part of the author, and partly the exploration of new paths which have been opened up in the course of the debate during the period covered by the submitted pieces. The methodology used is a consistent one. Most of the pieces are primarily theoretical and lie withing the broad field of political economy. Empirical material is frequently used to back up or form the background to primarily theoretical arguments. The author has not collected primary data but used existing data from a wide range of sources. Such originality as the method possesses comes from the way in which the data are processed, analyzed and presented. In contemporary economics this method is a threatened species, though it is still not extinct. It survives better in economic history than economics and it should be clear from these pieces that some of my principal influences have been economic historians. I am strongly of the view that this kind of interplay between theory and critically assessed empirical material, without much use of econometric methodology, remains a powerful and important method.
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