Collected Works of Michal Kalecki, vol. 5, Developing Economies.

Michal Kalecki (1899-1970) is best known for his anticipation of Keynes. His examination in the 1930s of the workings of the capitalist system focused on interdependencies between income distribution, finance, and demand in an economy operating below full employment. This work on modern capitalism, together with The General Theory, is the basis of post-Keynesian economics and establishes Kalecki among the leading economists of the twentieth century. His collected works, edited by Jerzy Osiatynski, first appeared in Polish and have since been translated into English. Volume V brings together essays on economic development written by Kalecki in the 1950s and 1960s when he was at the Economics Department of the U.N. Secretariat, the Polish Academy of Sciences, or the Polish Central School of Planning and Statistics.

When Kalecki turned his attention from demand-constrained developed economies to supply-constrained developing economies, he kept his focus on the distribution of income between classes. He was intent that development should not come at the expense of low wage workers and poor peasants. Kalecki expected urbanization and industrialization to raise incomes and increase the demand for necessities. The supply of agricultural output then sets the limit to acceptable growth: more rapid growth drives up food prices, reduces real wages, and triggers inflationary conflict. He viewed feudal landlords, merchants and moneylenders - demons he thrashes throughout his essays - as major impediments to increased agricultural productivity and saw land reform as a first step toward development.

Kalecki had little confidence in the ability of indigenous capitalists to propel growth in less developed countries. They could not marshall sufficient resources, he feared, and their investments would be misdirected into luxury-good sectors. He therefore championed state capitalism, with development paced to protect the poor against inflation and financed by taxes on high incomes and luxuries. Kalecki recognized that capital imports could ease the constraint that agriculture placed on non-inflationary growth, but he was leery of foreign aid, loans repayable in goods excepted. Nowhere in these essays does Kalecki consider population control as a way to check the growing demands for food and the threat of inflation that he associated with economic development.

Hostility to unfettered markets is evident throughout Volume V, whether in Kalecki's support of protectionism in a book review written in 1938; in his call for stricter capital controls to combat the black market in Israel in 1951; in his counsel of "continuous watchfulness" of the private sector of Cuban agriculture in 1960; or in a list of "minimum conditions" to be placed on foreign direct investments enumerated in 1966. Kalecki was not averse to use economic analysis for political ends, as in his 1970 critique (with Marcin Kula) of Che Guevara's guerrilla movement in Bolivia. "Only an alliance between miners and peasants could be a basis for revolution," he belatedly notes. Miners alone could not feed the guerrillas.

The contents of Volume V differ little from Kalecki's Essays on Developing Economies published in 1976. Joan Robinson's "Introduction" to this earlier volume appears as an appendix, as does Zofia Dobraska's Introduction to the Polish edition of Volume V. Notes by editor Osiatynski relate the essays to Kalecki's career and place Kalecki's ideas in the context of development debates of the 1950s and 1960s. While he rejected neoclassical prescriptions for trade-driven development, Osiatynski writes, Kalecki also counseled against radical industrialization. Unlike Nurkse and Myrdal, whose calls to transfer surplus labor en masse from agriculture to industry were answered by Mao's Great Leap, Kalecki stressed that increased agricultural output was prerequisite for balanced, sustainable development. And he argued that simple, labor-intensive improvements in both agriculture and industry generally made more sense for LDCs than ambitious mechanization.

Michal Kalecki has not much influenced the theory or practice of development economics, though traces of his emphasis on balanced, non-inflationary growth are found in the writings of the Structural School. The present volume supercedes Essays on Developing Economies as a reference among Kalecki's works.

Bernard Malamud University of Nevada Las Vegas