Profile of Andrew M. Kamarck (1914–2010)

By Mirek Tobiáš Hošman | 2026

MAJOR WRITINGS BY KAMARCK

1967. The Economics of African Development. New York: Praeger. (Translated to French, Swedish, Portuguese, and Spanish).

1970. "The Appraisal of Country Economic Performance," Economic Development and Cultural Change 18(2): 153–165.

1976. The Tropics and Economic Development: A Provocative Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations. Washington, DC: World Bank Group. (Translated to French and Spanish).

1983. Economics & the Real World. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

2001. Economics for the Twenty-first Century: The Economics of the Economist-Fox. Aldershot: Ashgate.

2002. Economics as a Social Science: An Approach to Nonautistic Theory. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.

Andrew Martin Kamarck (1914–2010) was an American economist. For most of his professional life he worked in policymaking institutions where economics training was indispensable but, as he put it, “experience taught that to be useful it had to be greatly modified from conventional theory.”^[1] Kamarck was directly involved in postwar economic reconstructions in Italy and Germany and in the preparation of policy guidelines for the Marshall Plan at the US Treasury. He spent most of his career as a prominent economist at the World Bank where he headed the Economics Department for six years and oversaw a dramatic recruitment of economists to the organization.

Kamarck’s career and ideas offer a distinct window through which to view the evolving landscape of development economics in the second half of the twentieth century; one that was shaped by the specificities of working at one of the most important international development agencies at the time, as well as by the constant interactions with leading economists in academia. The fact that he straddled these institutional spaces led Kamarck to develop views that were largely marginalized by his contemporaries, such as his belief in the importance of climate and environment for economic development and the relevance of health and other so-called social sectors in Africa’s postcolonial trajectory. Gradually, Kamarck became skeptical about the ability of economics to tackle development issues, and he criticized the field for not only ignoring the contributions of other disciplines – like sociology, anthropology, and history – but also for ignoring the real world in favor of theoretically precise econometric models.

Kamarck’s international experience was deeply embedded in his writing. Besides his time at the World Bank headquarters in Washington, D.C., and sabbaticals at UCLA and Harvard, he also travelled the world extensively in his role as chief of a number of Bank economic missions and delegations. In the course of his career, he developed a nuanced understanding of the development process in widely different institutional and country contexts, which was further sharpened by a strong comparative dimension. This understanding made Kamarck wary of overarching theories and all-encompassing models aimed at analyzing economic systems. In his view, reality simply wasn’t malleable to such an exercise. His experience as an international economic advisor and international economic thinker thus allowed him to escape both ivory-tower theorizing and the embedding in specificities of a single project, sector, or country without the ability to derive more general insight.

This profile offers a brief biographical sketch of Kamarck, who remains overlooked in the existing scholarship, and an overview of some of his views on climate and environment, African development, the work of economists at the World Bank, and the state of economics as a discipline at the end of the twentieth century.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Kamarck was born on November 10, 1914, in Newton Falls, New York. He studied economics and political economy at Harvard University where he also received his Ph.D. in 1951 under the supervision of Edward Mason. In 1939, Kamarck joined the International Section of the Federal Reserve Board but was called to active duty after America’s entry into the Second World War and became an instructor at the Field Artillery School. In 1943, he was posted to Allied Control Commission for Italy where he supervised the Italian central bank (Banka d’Italia) and the Institute for Industrial Reconstruction (IRI). Afterwards, he was assigned as chief of US financial intelligence in Germany and became deputy director of the Control Council’s US Finance Division and US deputy on the Allied Finance Directorate for Germany. Kamarck’s stint in Germany clearly left a lasting mark on him. His daughter, Ellen Davies, remembered being told repeatedly how appalled Kamarck was by the things he had encountered there, such as a large trunk full of gold teeth in the vault of Deutsche Bank.

In 1946, Kamarck returned to the US and worked at the Treasury as chair of the Staff Committee for the cabinet-level National Advisory Council for International Monetary and Financial Problems. In this role, he helped to set policy guidelines for the Marshall Plan. In 1948, Kamarck returned to Italy as a US Treasury representative to advise on postwar economic reconstruction. It was during this posting that he reportedly grew to love everything Italian, and the affinity was mutual. In the 1980s, after Kamarck’s professional retirement, the Italian government invited him to Rome to receive a medal for his service in the postwar era.

After two years in Italy, Kamarck returned to the US and joined the recently established World Bank as an economic advisor for Europe, Australasia, and Africa. During the 1950s, he was responsible for both country economic reports and loan preparations. He was chief of Bank missions to the UK, France, Yugoslavia, Italy, Tunisia, Ghana, the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, the Union of South Africa, and Australia, and the chief economist of the mission to Uganda. Alongside his World Bank employment, Kamarck remained in close contact with academia and for several years also ran a short course on African Affairs at the Johns Hopkins University.

From 1964–1965 he was given a sabbatical from the World Bank and appointed as Regents Professor at UCLA. Kamarck returned to the Bank in March 1965 as the director of the newly established Economics Department where he oversaw the rapid recruitment of economists to the institution. In 1971, he was given another sabbatical at the Harvard Center of International Affairs (today the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs). After that, Kamarck became director of the Economic Development Institute (EDI), one of the World Bank’s affiliates, where he stayed until his retirement in 1977.

After retiring from the Bank, Kamarck served for eight years as a visiting and associate fellow at the Harvard Institute of International Development and continued teaching and writing on issues of economic development and on the state of economics as a scientific discipline. He also became increasingly involved in local politics in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, where he had relocated in the late 1970s. Cape Cod was a longtime bastion of the Republican Party and it was thanks to Kamarck, a Democrat, that the Democratic Party began to make gains in the area. Robert O’Leary, who in 2000 became the first Democratic state senator since the Civil War, called Kamarck the “grandfather” of the Democratic Party on the Cape Cod. However, Kamarck’s influence was bipartisan. When he was in his 90s, Governor of Massachusetts Mitt Romney, a Republican, appointed Kamarck to a commission to study and make recommendations for improving the economy of the Cape and Islands.

Kamarck remained active even in his later years. According to his daughter Davies, he enjoyed best the weekly breakfast meetings with the so-called Romeos (Retired Old Men Eating Out). “These men got together for an early breakfast every Monday morning and talked politics, or international affairs, or gossiped,” Davies recalled. “When my father was bed-ridden and could no longer attend, the others arranged to send him summaries of their meetings.” Kamarck passed away in March 2010.

CLIMATE AND ENVIRONMENT

The theme of climate and environment remained a constant on Kamarck’s intellectual agenda and penetrated all his writing. In 1972, one year after Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen published The Entropy Law and the Economic Process – a famous work widely regarded as decisive for the establishment of ecological economics as an academic subdiscipline – Kamarck invited him to present his research at the World Bank. As he put it: “I have never written a fan letter to an economist before but I must say there is no doubt in my mind that you have made a major contribution to economics – it is bound to change the way in which economists look at the world and do their work.”^[2]

Kamarck himself explored the theme primarily in his 1976 book titled The Tropics and Economic Development: A Provocative Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations. According to Kamarck, the popular contrast drawn between the so-called North and South was inadequate and a better dichotomy was between the rich Temperate Zones and the poor Tropics. He lamented the fact that economic writing on development had paid little or no attention to any possible influence of climate and that existing mathematical growth models made no provision for climatic parameters or variables. Furthermore, as most of the writing on economic problems that set disciplinary standards was done in rich countries where people did not have to consider the tropical conditions, these specific environmental factors were neglected in the discourse. Kamarck’s focus on climate, however, was not aimed to provide yet another unicausual explanation of development, as economist Paul Streeten argued in his foreword for the book, but rather to show that the effects of (tropical) climate cannot be isolated from the effects of nutrition, health, education, technology, and social organization when it comes to economic development.

The book partly served as a compendium of existing sources on tropical agriculture, diseases, pests, and parasites, as well as an overview of existing international research centers on tropical environment and agriculture, such as the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) co-sponsored by the World Bank, FAO, and the UNDP, the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (Centro Internacional de Mejoramiento de Maíz y Trigo, CIMMYT) in Mexico, the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines, the International Potato Center (Centro Internacional de la Papa, CIP) in Peru, and others.

One issue, which according to Kamarck suffered from an “amazing lack of consideration” (p. 57) in economic literature, was the devastating impact of tropical diseases such as bilharzia, malaria, river blindness, parasitic worms, and leprosy on economic development. As he pointed out, a person who had not been substantially affected by poor health was an exception in the Tropics, yet practically nothing had been done by economists to systematically analyze the specific obstacles to economic development posed by diseases or the economic and social costs and benefits of development projects designed to remove them. Without this information, Kamarck argued, it was impossible for a government or aid agency to allocate investments optimally between disease control and other projects. “In the meantime,” he concluded, “it is highly improbable that the existing distribution of resources is anywhere near optimal” (p.89).

Another environmental factor identified by Kamarck that greatly influenced development in the Tropics was the specificity of tropical soils and the lack of knowledge on tropical agriculture. With the exception of alluvial and volcanic soils, most of the soil in the Tropics contained little organic material which made it generally poor and very easy to destroy. At the same time, with high temperatures and abundant rains, the silicate minerals of the rocks were leached out which increased the proportion of iron and aluminum hydroxides. Kamarck warned that if drainage was impeded, the iron oxides may harden, and the passage of heavy agricultural implements may leave behind soil that was unworkable. Likewise, mechanical equipment could easily plow too deep into the thin layer of fertile soil and destroy the possibility of raising crops. A related issue was the abrasion of equipment, for instance of the steel discs of heavy plows, when used in the Tropics.

According to Kamarck, the composition and quality of soil directly influenced the preference for agricultural crops in the Tropics as well as the character of the food supply that often resulted in a shortage of dietary protein, further impacting the efficiency of workers. In the context of Africa, Kamarck also combined the specific agricultural conditions with a gender-based division of labor to account for what he termed the “sociological underemployment”. As he described, the poverty of tropical soils required a “shifting cultivation” system in which men cut and burned trees and other plants to clear new land in preparation for cultivation, but the actual cultivation was typically seen as women’s work to which few men contributed. Due to this underlying gender dynamic, men typically became migrant laborers in periods when their family was cultivating the land – a reasonable and perhaps inevitable strategy in the context of a large subsistence economy in Africa, as Kamarck pointed out. Indeed, the migrant labor system was extensive in some parts of Africa like Upper Volta, Nyasaland, and Basutoland. In Kamarck’s view, progress in Africa depended to a large extent on substituting this system, as it kept workers in a state of relative inefficiency. Men who constantly had to move between their farms and the money economy in urban areas were unable to either become more productive industrial and mine workers or more productive farmers.

AFRICAN DEVELOPMENT

During the 1950s, Kamarck increasingly specialized in African countries and was active in Africa-focused research networks and communities in the US (for ECOINT work related to Africa, see this site). When the World Bank established a separate African Department in the early 1960s, Kamarck became its chief economic advisor. In 1967, he published The Economics of African Development, an easy-to-read introduction to the main factors shaping the development of the continent. The book was generally praised among academics and practitioners with a second edition published in 1971 and translations to French, Swedish, Portuguese, and Spanish.

As we saw earlier, Kamarck identified the environmental conditions of Africa as crucial for pursuing economic and social development. The Economics of African Development also discussed the climatic conditions of the continent, including diseases, insects, microbes, and other pests attacking both crops and humans. Besides typically economic factors such as financial returns to investors and the backward-bending supply curve for labor, Kamarck also discussed the impact of institutions, colonial heritage, and cultural aspects of African societies, such as their openness to innovation, the prevalence of extended families, and the varied roles and positions of women. In this sense, Kamarck recognized several key ingredients of development assistance long before the international development community, including the World Bank, began to fully appreciate them. As early as 1957, Kamarck argued that in the development of Africa “investment in human beings, what we may classify as ‘current government expenditure’ on health, on education, on training African housewives, may be as important or more important than investment in roads or docks.”^[3]

A major contribution of The Economics of African Development was in compiling statistics and data as well as existing research on virtually every component present in African development – economic structure of African regions, population growth, export sectors and trade relations, and monetary and banking sector, among others. According to Kamarck (1964, 106) “Africa’s shape as a gigantic question mark” was profoundly appropriate and the lack of knowledge of African societies and nature hindered successful development efforts. Compilation of available knowledge was thus, in Kamarck’s view, essential.

Kamarck also analyzed the so-called commodity problem in Africa – the overreliance on a limited range of primary products in export profiles of African countries. Hans Singer and Raúl Prebisch (see his ECOINT profile) famously argued with their Prebisch-Singer hypothesis that the terms-of-trade of commodity producers were declining vis-à-vis producers of manufactured goods.^[4] The commodity problem was further accentuated by the extensive price fluctuations of primary products that increased the volatility of foreign exchange earnings. In his book, Kamarck offered an overview of the underlying dynamics of the commodity problem and the available statistical evidence. He also discussed the possible policy measures aimed at tackling the commodity problem, such as the stabilization of markets through international commodity agreements and trade preferences, and compensatory and supplementary finance schemes designed to offset unexpected shortfalls of export revenues.^[5] Alongside these international devices, Kamarck also touched upon national stabilization measures, especially the marketing boards set up across many African countries. He identified these boards as multipurpose institutions whose operations surpassed the narrow stabilization of revenues as they performed useful technical and commercial services and protected small farmers against collusive buying by the middlemen. At the same time, he acknowledged that the stabilization they sought to foster was often that of national income and not necessarily that of the prices paid to producers.

Kamarck was also skeptical about the overarching economic planning in Africa that was in vogue at the time of his writing. As he put it: “In Africa during the 1960s, the highest rate of economic growth may well have been reached in the production of plans – increasingly more ‘comprehensive’ and sophisticated plans. The Plan had become a symbol of independence, and a great deal of public attention was devoted to, and praises sung over, the plan document” (p. 265). The issue was not with economic planning per se, but rather the indulgence in supposedly sophisticated macro-economic modeling increasingly divorced from reality. According to Kamarck, many development economists had succumbed to the lure of the intellectual exercise represented by the latest and most sophisticated econometric models at the expense of improving basic statistical and economic information and engaging with specific real-world problems. This was where, as Kamarck argued, “the greatest mischief [had] been done”, seconding the observation of Hla Myint that “a good development economist should also be something of an applied historian of economic thought” (p. 269).

The increasing reliance on econometric models was not only unrealistic in Kamarck’s view but also left out many of the aspects that were crucial for African development and therefore skewed the debate. To Kamarck, non-economic factors, as stated above, were at least as important as purely economic ones in African development, yet the more rigorous and mathematical the economic model was, the less likely it was to take into account the non-economic factors. As we shall see, similar critiques of the state of the economics profession continued to be an important issue for Kamarck to which he returned after his retirement.

ECONOMISTS AT THE WORLD BANK

Kamarck spent most of his professional life at the World Bank, where he worked in different positions for over a quarter of a century (1950–1977). He witnessed first-hand the ever-expanding mandate and activities of the Bank during this time, and in many cases was the frontrunner of innovations – sometimes years before the organization decided to embrace them.

During the 1950s, Kamarck primarily worked on Africa, a region that, as we saw earlier, led him to emphasize development factors that were often neglected by his contemporaries. Kamarck advocated investment in so-called social sectors like health and education at the time when the Bank primarily focused on large-scale infrastructure and energy projects. He also called for increased economic analysis at the institution and aimed to elevate the status of economists who were mainly employed as background analysts at that time; a position that was distinctly subordinate to the financiers and engineers who ran the Bank.

In 1965, Kamarck became the director of the newly established Economics Department and managed the rapid recruitment of economists to the World Bank.^[6] In this role, he pushed for the improvement of the organization’s country economic reports and wider dissemination of the economic knowledge collected by Bank economists. He established the Bank’s early publication program and was also involved in early attempts to organize a central research program in development economics at the Bank (for details, see my ECOINT working paper). As director of the Bank’s economic work, Kamarck was at the forefront of the discipline and in contact with leading figures in the field – exchanging ideas, commenting on their work, organizing lectures and seminars, and inquiring about possible recruits from their university classes.

A distinctive trait of Kamarck’s intellectual agenda at the Bank was his refusal to adopt universal standards applicable to all developing countries – what was sometimes referred to as the one-size-fits-all approach. In his view, there was “no standard pattern, no one royal road to development” and each country must find its own way. As he argued: “It is useful to know what other countries have done […] but it would have to be a very special case where one country could follow exactly the same road that another had pioneered in the past, or fit into exactly the model applicable to another country.”^[7]

This epistemological stance had direct implications for how Kamarck thought the policy advisory role was supposed to be conducted by an organization like the World Bank. As countries differed profoundly in their economic structures, culture, history, institutional development, and environmental conditions, it was only to be expected that different governments would adopt different economic policies to foster development, and the Bank should recognize this variability and offer targeted, tailor-made policy consultation and expertise. As Kamarck pointed out, in a place like Hong Kong, the government may simply provide basic utilities and let the private economy boom; in a country like Malawi, economic development depended almost entirely on the stimulus given by the government.^[8]

A related aspect of this line of thinking was Kamarck’s recognition of the limitations of available knowledge. As we saw earlier, some factors important for development like climate and environment were largely left out of consideration. Context-specific and country-specific knowledge, especially of recently independent countries, was also inadequate. The appropriate position of a development economist coming to a country as an international advisor was as much about learning and studying as it was about advising. For this reason, Kamarck praised Albert Hirschman’s Development Projects Observed (1967), a study that, despite being financed by the World Bank, did not find a receptive audience within the organization.^[9] As he wrote to Hirschman upon receiving the final manuscript: “I found the earlier version stimulating and useful disorientation for development economists and engineers who know all the answers.”^[10]

Shortly after Robert McNamara became president of the World Bank in April 1968, Kamarck increasingly found himself out of place within the organization. He criticized the emphasis that McNamara’s Bank placed on enlarging the volume of investments and the number of loans as the central element of development assistance. Predefined lending targets and the focus on specific investment projects instead of more imaginative forms of assistance discussed at the Bank in the previous years led to the organization’s weakening position vis-à-vis its clients in terms of securing policy changes. With the expanding volume of lending, the quality of the projects deteriorated, and staff began to voice concerns about inadequate implementation, monitoring, and evaluation.^[11] The intellectual climate at the Bank also changed when Hollis Chenery replaced Irving Friedman as chief economist in September 1970. Well-known for his preference for quantitative analysis and econometric modeling, Chenery sought to reorganize the Bank’s economic work and bring it closer to academic-style analysis. The research division that Chenery promoted was, in Kamarck’s view, quickly colonized by model builders and, as he put it, “nothing useful has come out of it.”^[12]

Kamarck left the Bank in 1971 and returned as director of the Economic Development Institute (EDI) in 1972 after a sabbatical at Harvard. EDI was a Bank affiliate that focused on training mid-level bureaucrats and officials from developing countries, and as such was largely divorced from the day-to-day operations of the World Bank. During his tenure at EDI, Kamarck focused on expanding the institute’s course offering. He abolished the General Projects course and instead organized sector-specific courses such as Agro-Industrial Projects, Development Banking, Highway Projects, Industrial Projects, Managing Urban Growth, Rural Development, Rural Credit, Water Supply, and Wastewater Disposal. He also decentralized EDI’s structure and helped build training capacities in developing countries. While people in Washington would develop new courses, prepare and test new teaching materials and methods, and run courses to train trainers, EDI’s partners in developing countries would adopt these materials and techniques and run courses in their own countries. The growth of EDI was very much in line with the growth of the World Bank Group. Before Kamarck, it organized 12 courses a year. In Kamarck’s last year, the number went to 31: 11 in Washington and 20 overseas.

ECONOMIST-FOX

Kamarck continued to work and write on economic development after his retirement from EDI, and he kept in close contact with Harvard following his move to Cape Cod. His primary focus was on the state of economics as a discipline, which culminated in the publication of Economics and the Real World (1983) – hailed by economist Paul Streeten as “one of the sanest books published in our field in a long time.”^[13]Kamarck’s objective was to collect existing criticisms and neglected accounts in mainstream literature, documenting the tendency of economics to ignore the messy reality in favor of precise numbers and well-behaved theoretical models based on stylized assumptions. Economists, Kamarck argued, had the conscious or unconscious understanding of economics as a science comparable to physics, which led them to expect that they should be able to achieve the same degree of precision and predictability as mechanics in physics. For this reason, Kamarck also criticized the name economic “model” as it carried with it the implication of a mechanism that exactly simulated the behavior of a larger mechanical system. “Economics cannot be this exact,” Kamarck wrote, “and it is misleading to imply that it is.” (p. 78)

The inaccuracy of economic observations that Kamarck highlighted was closely connected with the inadequacy of economic data. Not only was the available information dubious – Kamarck referred to Dudley Seers’ view that most national accounts contained a degree of fantasy, and any competent statistician could easily justify doubling or halving many items – but it was also conceptually imprecise. He illustrated the point using the example of unemployment in Indonesia where women whose main occupation was housekeeping were classified as outside the labor force even though over 1 million of them worked outside the home in paid employment for at least 20 hours a week, while women who did not do housekeeping and had fewer hours of paid employment were classified as being in the labor force. In this case, as in many others, Kamarck thought that for economists to truly understand the economy, they had to embrace contexts and aspects that went beyond pure economics and supplement economics with other disciplines.

Kamarck revisited the topic in his last two books, Economics for the Twenty-First Century: The Economics of the Economist-Fox (2001) and Economics as a Social Science: An Approach to Nonautistic Theory (2002). In line with his 1983 book, Kamarck criticized the fundamental assumptions of the neoclassical theory such as rationality and self-interest maximization. He also attacked economists’ preoccupation with the equilibrium analysis, arguing that the concept of equilibrium contradicted one of the most important defining characteristics of the capitalist economy – change and growth. In his view, the economy had no fixed and stable point toward which it would move or to which it returned after disturbances. According to Kamarck, the process of change was the essence of the capitalist system. The economy was primarily dynamic, not static. As he wrote, the general equilibrium model was “truly a magnificent intellectual achievement” that future scholars would likely regard as “one of the inexplicable human obsessions of the past, raking perhaps with the search for the fountain of youth but less productive of useful by-products than the thousand years’ vain attempt to find the magic philosopher’s stone.”^[14]

Kamarck also rejected simplistic views of market-state relations, pointing out how the transition of former centrally-planned economies in Eastern Europe provided a graphic lesson that the state had a much greater role vis-à-vis markets than neoclassical economics had acknowledged – indeed, in the Polanyian fashion, Kamarck concluded that state was essential to the market. At the same time, Kamarck problematized the view that market forces controlled the economies around the globe after the breakdown of the Soviet Union and brought attention to the dominant and increasing role of corporations in the system. In his view, people in high-income countries lived in a corporate system that profoundly differed from the economy where decisions flew out of the impersonal markets. People in corporations, Kamarck argued, exercised a degree of discretion and power when they made decisions which presented an opportunity for a whole spectrum of human emotions and motives to come into play. This was one reason why corporate economy differed from the classical conventional economy driven by the market. According to Kamarck: “It is fundamental to embrace the fact that the modern dynamic free-enterprise private-property system is, in its central core, managed – not market – capitalism – influenced by market forces but with an important set of its own non market dynamics.”^[15] It was precisely this set of non-market dynamics that Kamarck thought economists should embrace and study.

In his last books, Kamarck also returned to environmental concerns, emphasizing the limits of markets as instruments for coping with environmental problems both internationally and domestically. In his view, no satisfactory accounting measures existed for the stock of natural resources, the quality of air and water, the absorptive and dilutive capacity of the environment, and the aesthetics of the ambiance in which people live. “There is no market in which the prices of environmental ‘goods’ such as clean air, clean water, or beautiful beaches are quoted,” he argued. While states could organize a market in which, for instance, pollution rights were traded and these could be effective for reducing pollution, Kamarck argued that an arbitrary, non-market decision had to be taken on the magnitude of the problem. In line with his other arguments, economics was an important ingredient, but hardly ever the sufficient one to consider.

Kamarck’s last two books were written within the framework of the “economist-fox” – one even explicitly used the term in the title. This referred to the famous essay by philosopher Isaiah Berlin that differentiated between thinkers who related everything to a single system or organizing principle (hedgehogs) and those who saw the world as too various to be captured by any single universal absolute (foxes). Where hedgehogs knew a lot about a single thing, foxes knew somewhat less but about many different things. In this sense, it was the perspective of a fox that Kamarck adopted and promoted in his work and the style of his writing reflected this perspective. His last two books were written in an essayistic style, filled with metaphors, allegories, and references to non-economic writings by philosophers, writers, historians, and anthropologists, as well as to contemporary events. The fox metaphor remained central to Kamarck’s identity as an economic thinker, with the epithet “Economist-Fox” even featuring on his tombstone.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

I wish to express my gratitude to Ellen Davies for kindly sharing her memories of her father, photographs, and a collection of his work.

SOURCES

Alacevich, Michele. 2014. “Visualizing Uncertainties, or How Albert Hirschman and the World Bank Disagreed on Project Appraisal and What This Says about the End of ‘High Development Theory’,” Journal of the History of Economic Thought 36(2): 137–68.

Hošman, Mirek Tobiáš. 2023. “Internal Dynamics as Drivers of Change in International Organizations: The Economists’ Takeover at the World Bank,” Swiss Journal of Sociology 49(1): 41–60.

Hošman, Mirek Tobiáš. 2024. “’The Most Important Research Project’: The World Bank and the Commodity Problem of International Development in the 1960s,” European Journal of the History of Economic Thought31(6): 1034–57.

Kamarck, Andrew. 1964. “Some Problems of African Development,” Finance & Development 1(2): 106–112.

Kamarck, Andrew. 1970. "The Appraisal of Country Economic Performance," Economic Development and Cultural Change 18(2): 153–165.

Kamarck, Andrew. 2001. Economics for the Twenty-first Century: The Economics of the Economist-Fox. Aldershot: Ashgate.

Kamarck, Andrew. 2002. Economics as a Social Science: An Approach to Nonautistic Theory. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.

Sharma, Patrick Allan. 2017. Robert McNamara’s Other War: The World Bank and International Development. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Streeten, Paul. 1985. “Andrew M. Kamarck, ‘Economics and the Real World’ (Book Review), Economic Development and Cultural Change 34(1): 173–6.

Toye, John – Toye, Richard. 2003. “The Origins and Interpretation of the Prebisch-Singer Thesis,” History of Political Economy 35(3): 437–67.

Reference anything from this site as:

Hošman, Mirek Tobiáš (2026) “International Economic Thinkers-Profile: Andrew M. Kamarck”, ECOINT IET Profile 15, available at: https://www.ecoint.org/post/profile-of-andrew-m-kamarck-1914-2010

^[1] Kamarck (2002, v).

^[2] Kamarck to Georgescu-Roegen, August 29, 1972. Economists' Papers at Duke University, Collection of Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, Box 23.

^[3] Economic Potential of Sub-Saharan Africa, Folder: Kamarck, Andrew M. – Articles and Speeches (1957 – 1970) – 1v, Folder ID: 1651972, World Bank Group Archives: 8.

^[4] Toye and Toye (2003).

^[5] See Hošman (2024) for the analysis of the World Bank’s involvement in the commodity problem during the first UN Development Decade of the 1960s.

^[6] For details, see Hošman (2023).

^[7] Kamarck (1970, 159).

^[8] Kamarck (1970, 160).

^[9] See Alacevich (2014).

^[10] Kamarck to Hirschman, January 2, 1968. Andrew M. Kamarck Accession 10941-77-03-17, Box 4, American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming.

^[11] See Sharma (2017).

^[12] Kamarck, Interview for the World Bank Oral History Program, November 2, 1985: 22.

^[13] Streeten (1985, 173).

^[14] Kamarck (2002, 123).

^[15] Kamarck (2001, 40).