Schumpeter v. Keynes Ford/IIE Workshop

A workshop was held at Columbia University on December 5-6, 2013 concerned with exploring the effects of macro economic conditions and policies on pace and orientation of economic development, viewed as a process that involves centrally innovation (in the sense of introducing ways of doing things that are new in the environment) and structural transformation.

The workshop would bring together about fifteen economists, who have a central interest in economic development, but who reside in two different intellectual camps that to date have not communicated much with each other, and should. One camp consists of industrial economists who take a Schumpeterian-evolutionary-structural transformation perspective on economic development, and whose research has mostly been at the microeconomic level, but who increasingly are recognizing the importance of macroeconomic conditions and policies. The other camp consists of macroeconomists, who increasingly are recognizing that the economic development process is one of disequilibrium and continuing structural transformation, but who do not know much about the details of the processes involved. The Ford Foundation and the Institute for International Education have kindly agreed to support this first workshop, which we hope will provide the focus and energy for a range of future research projects.