REVIEW
A new perspective on development
A Modern Guide to Uneven Economic Development Edited by Erik S. Reinert and Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven, Elgar Modern Guides, 2023, 428 pages
The essay collection A Modern Guide to Uneven Economic Development makes a powerful case for defining a new role for the state in the economy rather
In contrast, Reinert and Kvangraven advocate an alternative economic view. The book also features post-colonial economists mostly missing from today’s body of teaching, including the Egyptian author Samir Amin. It is divided into six main themes, starting with a definition of uneven development and the difference between nature-made and policy-made sources of uneven development. It goes on to explain assumptions of, and approaches to, uneven development and expands on mechanisms that create and prevent inequality. The remaining three chapters broadly deal with successful cases of development led by state-owned enterprises, uneven development and “financialized” capitalism. Here emerging economies are subordinate to a US dollar market-based system, constraining sovereign economic policy and the unequal exchange from an ecological
than abandoning it By Mahdi Rahimi, OPEC Fund
“E conomics today resembles Catholic theology in medieval Europe: a rigid doctrine guarded by a modern priesthood who claim to possess the sole truth. Dissenters are shunned.” That was the rather harsh verdict of economist Ha-Joon Chang, currently professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, in a July 2025 article for the Financial Times 1 . In a similar vein the book A Modern Guide to Uneven Economic Development tries to open new viewpoints off the beaten track of mainstream economics. Edited by Erik S. Reinert and Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven, who both teach economics in London, the anthology aims to develop an alternative canon of economic ideas, away from the Bretton
Woods consensus forged in 1944 as the Second World War came to an end and the great powers still were just that. And so they went on to reorder the world. Bretton Woods was a watershed moment in terms of institution building
(with the establishment of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank), but also in governance by setting up a system of rules and procedures to regulate the international monetary system. One of the guiding philosophies was David Ricardo’s Comparative Advantage Theory, which holds that countries should only produce what they are good at while trading everything else with other countries.
A watershed moment in global economic history: The Bretton Woods Conference, 1944
1 “Economics teaching has become the Aeroflot of ideas” Ha-Joon Chang, Financial Times, July 23, 2025
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