As Published in the Trinidad and Tobago Review, Port of Spain, November 2005
Norman Girvan
I first met Lloyd Best in 1960 when he was a young economics researcher on the Mona Campus of the UWI and I, an economics undergraduate. Lloyd had a huge impact on a group of students that included Walter Rodney and [...]

Filed under: Tributes to Caribbean Thinkers |

It has been said that terrorism is the “the weapon of the weak”—an instrument that is used against an adversary with an overwhelming preponderance of conventional military power. If that is so, then security may be said to be “the preoccupation of the strong”—it reflects the need of the dominant power or powers to maintain [...]

Filed under: Norman's Commentaries 2000-2007 |

Prepared for the UNRISD Conference on the role of Social Knowledge in Development Policy Making, this paper argues the need for the South to secure greater policy autonomy and discusses factors involved in achieving this. In the 1950s the subdiscipline of development economics promoted policy autonomy by legitimizing the principle that their economies should be [...]

Filed under: Caribbean Thought, Power and Knowledge |

Remarks at IFD Panel – International Forum on Development, New York, October 2005
In the Caribbean we have had various economic theories and strategies of development. In fact we could say that Caribbean society was created by a theory – the theory of Mercantilism in the 17th and 18th centuries – which gave rise to the [...]

Filed under: Norman's Commentaries 2000-2007 |

Abstract. Examines differences and similarities in the approach to economic development of the Plantation School of Caribbean economists and of W.Arthur Lewis by locating them within their respective theoretical frameworks. By tracing the evolution of Lewis’s thinking from Caribbean industrialization to the ‘dual economy’ and then to trade and development, it argues that the focus [...]

Filed under: Caribbean Thought, Power and Knowledge, Tributes to Caribbean Thinkers |