Gunnar Myrdal.

• Author: Ho, P. Sai-Wing
• Position: Ahead of the Curve - Biography

Born in 1898 in Sweden, Nobel Laureate Gunnar Myrdal would become one of the leading economists of the twentieth century. Known for his research on transformative issues in underdeveloped economies, he believed inequality to be a major impediment to economic and social progress, and the reduction of inequality a precondition for development.

Myrdal received more than 30 honorary degrees before his death in 1987. He earned his Doctor of Law Degree in Economics from Stockholm University in 1927 and six years later assumed its Lars Hierta Chair in Political Economy and Public Finance. He spent approximately eight years as a Senator in the Swedish Parliament, two years as Chairman of the Swedish Post-war Planning Commission and two years as the Swedish Minister of Commerce. For ten years, beginning in 1947, Myrdal held the position of Executive Secretary of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (ECE). In 1961, he served as Professor of International Economics and Director of the Institute of International Economic Studies at his alma mater. In 1974, he shared the Nobel Prize in Economic Science with Friedrich A. Hayek.

Myrdal played a key role in formulating the United Nations unified approach to development planning. Looking back on this period, while in his 80s, he recalled1 he "came closer" to development problems during his years with ECE partly because some countries, especially in eastern and southern Europe, were relatively poor at that time. His interests were further directed to the problems in underdeveloped countries through his close cooperation with the secretariats of the regional economic commissions for Asia and Latin America. As Angresano (2) observed, it was during the later years at the ECE that Myrdal's lectures on transformation issues in underdeveloped countries generated some of his key contributions to development analysis. (In the ensuing decades, he was to continue to build on these contributions in, among other publications, Asian Drama: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations; The Challenge of World Poverty: A World Anti-Poverty Program in Outline; and Against the Stream: Critical Essays on Economics.)

In 1954, a paper Myrdal delivered for a symposium on economic welfare later expanded into An International Economy: Problems and Prospects (1956). The following year, a series of lectures delivered in Cairo were published as Development and Underdevelopment: A Note on the Mechanism of National and...