The Role of Elites in Economic Development

Alice Amsden (now deceased) was Barton L. Weller Professor of Development Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She authored Asia's Next Giant and the Rise of 'The Rest'. Most recently, she criticized the 'capabilities' approach to poverty alleviation, arguing that healthier and more educated job seekers cannot get jobs because there are none, and they cannot lower their subsistence wage any further. Some of her last work, alongside co-directing the UNU-WIDER research project and co-editing the resulting volume on the role of elites, was on a manuscript entitled 'The Rational Revolution: Learning from Role Models, Deserting Deductive Theory', which maintains that countries develop by studying what each other do, not from poring over Enlightenment propositions in their orthodox or modern manifestation.

Alisa DiCaprio is a Research Fellow at United Nations University's World Institute for Development Economics Research. Prior to joining UNU-WIDER, she was a Post-Doctoral Fellow at New York University's Alexander Hamilton Center for Political Economy. In addition to her academic work, she has worked in the public and private sector supporting US trade policy, researching emerging market opportunities for exporters, and organizing unions in the healthcare sector.


James Robinson is David Florence Professor of Government at Harvard University and a faculty associate at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science. Professor Robinson studied economics at the London School of Economics, the University of Warwick, and Yale University. He previously taught in the Department of Economics at the University of Melbourne and the University of Southern California. Before moving to Harvard he was a Professor in the Departments of Economics and Political Science at the University of California at Berkeley. His main research interest is the political economy of development with a particular interest in Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa.