Modeling the world economy : Guy Orcutt and the forgotten origins of economic research at the World Bank

A Working Paper by Mirek Tobiáš Hošman | 2026

The World Bank is one of the most important centers of economic research worldwide. Historical reconstructions of the Bank’s research program usually point to the presidency of Robert McNamara and highlight the role of his chief economist Hollis Chenery as the principal architect of the organization’s research apparatus formally institutionalized in 1971. This paper, however, revisits an earlier and mostly forgotten episode: an attempt to establish a research function at the Bank in the late 1960s under the direction of economist Guy Orcutt. Based on new archival sources, this paper reconstructs Orcutt’s proposal to establish a central research function at the Bank together with the intellectual debates surrounding it. It traces disagreements over the purpose of a research function, the nature of economic inquiry, and the promises and limits of quantitative and model-based analysis at the Bank. In line with the analytical approach that focuses on internal lives of international organizations and the role of individuals working within them, I show how economists tasked with designing the research program themselves perceived the rationale, scope, intended audience, and mission of what they were trying to achieve. In this sense, the paper also contributes to the history of development economics. The debates triggered by Orcutt’s proposal capture the period of rupture and the contingent emergence of a new intellectual climate – shaped externally by wider disciplinary shifts and internally by the ascending McNamara’s regime. This was exemplified by the limited resources and consideration that Orcutt’s project received – prompting his early departure from the Bank – only for a similar design to flourish a few years later. Orcutt’s brief engagement with the Bank thus exposes the initial institutional fragility of a research conception that would later become dominant and even synonymous with the organization’s research program and its intellectual role in development economics.

HOŠMAN, Mirek Tobiáš (2026), Modeling the world economy : Guy Orcutt and the forgotten origins of economic research at the World Bank, EUI, HEC, Working Paper, 2026/04, ECOINT - https://hdl.handle.net/1814/95641