This question, apparently unproblematic, has been at the center of the development discourse for decades now. Indeed, the first major debate that shaped the discipline—the 1950s balanced-growth versus unbalanced-growth debate—was fought under the rubric of what actually defined development economics as a distinct disciplinary field. Albert Hirschman (1958, 51) famously criticized the theory of balanced growth, whose principal authors he identified in Paul Rosenstein-Rodan, Ragnar Nurkse, and Tibor Scitovsky, on the ground that the theory failed “as a theory of development.” As Hirschman put it,

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撰写发展经济学史

这个问题显然没有问题，几十年来一直是发展讨论的中心。事实上，塑造该学科的第一场主要辩论——1950 年代的平衡增长与不平衡增长的辩论——是在实际将发展经济学定义为一个独特的学科领域的标题下进行的。Albert Hirschman (1958, 51) 著名地批评了平衡增长理论，他在 Paul Rosenstein-Rodan、Ragnar Nurkse 和 Tibor Scitovsky 中指出了平衡增长理论的主要作者，理由是该理论“作为一种发展理论”失败了。正如赫希曼所说，