Profile of Ester Boserup (1910-1999)

By Sabine Selchow | 2025

Major writings:

• Boserup, Ester. 1965. The Conditions of Agricultural Growth: The Economics of Agrarian Change under Population Pressure. London: Allen & Unwin.

• Boserup, Ester. 1970. Women’s Role in Economic Development. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

• Boserup, Ester. 1981. Population and Technological Change: A Study of Long-Term Trends. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Reports she was involved in during her time an the UN Economic Commission for Europe (1947-1957):

• United Nations: Food and Agriculture Organization, European Agriculture: A Statement of Problems, Geneva, 1954, 83 pp.

• United Nations: Economic Commission for Europe, Economic Survey of Europe in 1954, Geneva, 1955, Chapter 6: “Problems of Regional Development and Industrial Location in Europe”, pp. 136–71.

• United Nations: Economic Commission for Europe, Economic Survey of Europe in 1954, Geneva, 1955, Chapter 7: “The French Economy: Basic Problems of Occupational Structure and Regional Balance”, pp. 172–76.

• United Nations: Economic Commission for Europe, Economic Survey of Europe in 1956, Geneva, 1957, Part II (Chapters 5 & 6): “European Transport Problems”, pp. 1–29 + pp. 1–17.

Ester Boserup (nee Børgesen, 1910–1999) was a Danish economist and social scientist. After her father's death, when she was two, Boserup was brought up by her mother in a progressive household but shaped by financial difficulties. Already as a teenager, Boserup was involved in leftist politics. It was in this context that she met her life-partner Mogens Boserup. She married him in 1931. In the mid-1930s, the Boserups were "the leading force" in the Danish Clarté group, involved in Europe-wide networking and exchange (Trolle URL).

In 1935, Ester Boserup graduated in theoretical economics from the University of Copenhagen. She also took classes in other disciplines, such as sociology, anthropology, agricultural policy. Looking back, she saw her intellectual formation being shaped by the "structural problems of human societies" at the time and their mismatch with established economic theories. "I began the University in the autumn of 1929, when the New York stock market crashed, and when I left we were still in the middle of the Great Depression of the thirties. Against this background, the prevailing theories of equilibrium and marginal utility seemed irrelevant and — like many of my fellow students — I looked for alternatives" (Boserup 1999: 9). From 1935 to 1947, after graduation, Boserup worked as a civil servant in the Danish administration, at one point as the head of its economic planning office. Between 1937 and 1944, she gave birth to three children.

Contribution

The originality of Boserup’s work and her intellectual contribution in the form of her 'models' and analyses of agricultural intensification and population pressure, women’s role in economic practices, in general, and in ‘development’, in particular, and the relation between demographic trends and technological innovation have been widely acknowledged (she received several honorary degrees), are well-discussed (e.g. Desai 2019, Fischer-Kowalski, et al 2014, Mackenna 2023, Tinker 2001) and have also been critically deconstructed – the latter, sometimes polemically and sometimes thoughtfully grounded, like in Lourdes Benería (see Profile) and Gita Sen’s seminal discussion of Boserup's Woman’s Role in Economic Development (Benería and Sen 1981).

One of the most remarkable aspects of Boserup’s work is its distinct adaptability. Like a Swiss-knife, Boserup's work was able to do all at the same time: impacting multiple academic discourses, shaping empirical research, informing policies and, indeed, policy frames, contributing to theory-building, fostering the development of new concepts, and, not least, serving as a foundation for institutions such as the UN Decade for Women (1976–1985) and Women in Development (WID). Speaking for the field of international law, Mackenna (2023: 198) observes, “[i]t is somewhat ironic that an individual despite being largely on the margins of discipline can, through their work, come to have a profound influence on its most fundamental tenets.”

Boserup as an International Economic Thinker

Within the ECOINT-project (Sluga 2021), being an 'international economic thinker' means to produce economic knowledge – in one way or other – within the realm of international institutions. Boserup was an “international economic thinker’. She entered this category in 1947, when she and her family moved to Geneva where she and her partner Mogens took up positions in the Research and Planning Division of the UN Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE). The division was directed by Nicholas Kaldor, who saw Boserup as "one of the ablest and most imaginative members of [his] group" and praised her "ingenuity in using statistics to exhibit the trends in world trade, and to pin-point the causes of the disequilibrium between the dollar and the non-dollar world" (Kaldor 1965: 2). Among other things, Boserup fed into the Economic Survey of Europe.

In 1957, Ester and Mogens Boserup resigned from UNECE to take up research positions in Gunnar Myrdal's project on agriculture in South and Southeast Asia, funded by the US 20th Century Fund (now: The Century Foundation). From then, until the end of her professional life, Boserup worked as a consultant for and was involved in other capacities with various international organisations, prominently the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), but also the UN Commission on the Status of Women and the International Labour Organizations (ILO). It was in these later years that she wrote her three monographs. The Conditions of Agricultural Growth: The Economics of Agrarian Change Under Population Pressure was published in 1965, Woman’s Role in Economic Development in 1970 and Population and Technological Change: A Study of Long-Term Trends came out in 1981. 

Unconventional conventional 'international economic thinker'

Acknowledging Boserup as an 'international economic thinker' due to her engagement with international organisations is, of course, only of limited value. It is more interesting to ask, what kind of 'international economic thinker' she was. One could say she was an unconventional conventional 'international economic thinker'. Putting it differently, she was unconventional as an ‘economic thinker’, and conventional when it came to the ‘international’.

Boserup consciously chose a unique path to produce the kind of economic knowledge she imagined was valuable. As she explains in an interview with Mathieu (2014), she deliberately rejected a traditional university career, ostensibly because she did not want to teach, but probably also because she thought that an academic career might constrain her approach to knowledge production. Boserup believed in a research perspective on realities that was not confined by the ‘truths’ of any particular discipline or academic discourse; she called it ‘interdisciplinary’, with which she meant the practice “to follow major developments in some other disciplines than [the] own” (Boserup 1999: 59) and to integrated these. As she explained regarding her book Population and Technological Change: “Somebody should have the courage not to specialise and to look at how one can bring things together. That is what I have tried to do” (in: Mathieu 2014: 14). The space outside the university then was for Boserup a domain of freedom from the constrains entailed in peer-review. At the same time, it was a space that gave her the confidence to challenge conventional bodies of knowledge. “Had I chosen a university career instead, I would have read all these books and said: ‘This is true, everybody says so.’ I would not have had the courage to say it is incorrect” (in: Mathieu 2014: 14). In this sense, her challenge to conventional theories of the time, such as Malthus’s idea of the relationship between population growth and food production, can be seen as a byproduct rather than a primary goal of her work. Her focus lay in developing insights about empirical realities. “If I have been controversial and if I write against Malthusianism and neoclassical economics implicitly and sometimes explicitly, it is most probably also because my career is different - since I did not want to teach at university” (Mathieu 2014: 14). When asked specifically about Malthus, Boserup explained that it was the publisher of her The Conditions of Agricultural Growth who had chosen to foreground her critique of his theory. “A great advertisement, of course,” she remarked, adding: “In reality, I wrote very, very little about Malthus. […] I am not interested in old economists but in how things relate to each other today” (Mathieu 2014: 15). In studying ‘how things relate to each other today’, Boserup favoured an empirical and inductive approach. It was her observations at the grassroots level in India (1957-1960) and in Senegal (1964-5) – where Morgens directed the UN Institute for Economic Development and Planning (IDEP), while Ester worked as a consultant for the Centre for Industrial Development – that informed her analyses and arguments. As she put it herself, her interest was “the interplay of economic and non-economic factors in the process of social change, both today and in the past, viewing human societies as dynamic relationships between natural, economic, cultural, and political structures, instead of trying to explain them within the framework of one or a few disciplines” (Boserup 1999: 4). By positioning herself outside academia, Boserup gained the freedom to critically assess established knowledges and bring together diverse insights, ultimately shaping her groundbreaking contributions to development theory and gender studies. Arguably, it was this unconventional way of producing economic knowledge and the kind of knowledge that emerged from it that accounted for its adaptability, relatively wide reach, and productivity. It was adaptable in a diversity of contexts - and, as Fischer-Kowalski et al (2014: vii) suggest, Boserup worked towards its adaption and adoption: “Boserup was not only a scientist but also a diplomat. She spent much of her lifetime on making her scientific insights bear fruits in international policies.” In quotes mentioned above, Boserup uses the word ‘courage’ in two different ways when she talked about her approach. This word might also be used to describe her decision to prioritise relative intellectual freedom over a secure academic or other secure position. She accepted the challenges that are inevitably entailed in the precarity of a professional, intellectual life that dependents on short-term funding to stay committed to what she perceived as a valuable way of knowledge production.

As much as Boserup was an unconventional ‘international economic thinker’ in terms of the kind of economic knowledge she produced, she was also a conventional 'international economic thinker'. Reflecting retrospectively on her move to the UNECE in 1947, Boserup described it as a transition “from Danish problems to international problems” (Boserup 1999: 15). When one looks at her work , it becomes apparent that the problems she addressed as 'international problems’ were 'international' in the way that they were part of the historical international institutional discourse — prominently, economic developmental challenges of non-Western countries. Within this discourse Boserup challenged Western or other hegemonic frames and theories (but, again, see for instance Benería and Sen (1980) for a discussion of Boserup's implied commitment to modernization theory and neoclassical economic concepts); her work also contains critical reflections on colonial legacies. But Boserup did not understand ‘the international’ as powerful in itself. She did not use the site of international organisations as sites to challenge the very nature and paradoxes of ‘the international’. In this sense, Boserup inhabited international sites as spaces to test, challenge, and rewrite important, but established problems and conventional ways of thinking about them. One might say, somewhat paradoxically, this was exactly due to what made her mode of knowledge production original and unconventional in the first place, namely, her relative detachment from explicit theoretical, or ‘academic’ vantage points. Inevitably, even if committed to what she perceived as ‘interdisciplinarity’, Boserup was a subject of her academic economic training; this shaped her outlook at realities and included a blindness for the power of ‘the international’. Any radical questioning of the power and politics of ‘the international’ would have only been possible from an intellectual vantage point opposite to the one Boserup chose, namely one that was not only outside traditional academic disciplines, like Boserup’s, but, at the same time, firmly anchored within a fundamentally different discourse with its own conceptual language.

In this sense, Boserup was a conventional ‘international economic thinker’, but an incredible ‘unconventional’ one who had ‘the courage’, to use her own words, to take an intellectual position from which she was able to challenge many hegemonic ways of seeing the world.

References

• Benería, Lourdes, and Gita Sen. 1981. Accumulation, Reproduction, and Women's Role in Economic Development: Boserup Revisited. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 7(2): 279–298.

• Desai, Vandana. 2019. ‘Ester Boserup’ in: Simon, David (eds). Key Thinkers in Development. 2nd edition, London: Routledge, 69-76.

• Fischer-Kowalski, Marina, et al (eds.). 2014. Ester Boserup’s legacy on sustainability: orientations for contemporary research. Springer Nature.

• Kaldor, Nicholas. 1965. ‘Preface’ in: Boserup, Ester. 1965. The Conditions of Agricultural Growth: The Economics of Agrarian Change under Population Pressure. London: Allen & Unwin, 2.

• Mackenna, Miriam Bak. 2023. ‘Ester Boserup: Women and Development on the Margins’, in Immi Tallgren (ed.), Portraits of Women in International Law: New Names and Forgotten Faces? Oxford: Oxford University Press, 196–208.

• Mathieu, Jon. 2014. ‘ “Finding out is my Life”: Conversations with Ester Boserup’ in: Fischer-Kowalski, Marina, et al. Ester Boserup’s legacy on sustainability: orientations for contemporary research. Springer Nature, 13-22.

• Sluga, Glenda. 2021. "Twentieth-Century International Economic Thinking, and the Complex History of Globalization: A New Research Programme" EUI Working Paper HEC 2021/01 https://hdl.handle.net/1814/71573

• Tinker, Irene. 2011. “A Tribute to Ester Boserup: utilizing interdisciplinarity to analyze global socio-economic change”, presented at Global Tensions Conference held at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY March 9-10, 2001, http://irenetinker.com/publications-and-presentations/ester-boserup

• Trolle, Børge ‘Danish Trotskyism in World War Two’ https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/revhist/backiss/vol2/no2/danish.html (last accessed: 1 April 2025)

Reference anything from this site as:

Selchow, Sabine (2025) 'International Economic Thinkers-Profile:Ester Boserup', ECOINT IET Profile #12, available at: https://www.ecoint.org/post/profile-of-ester-boserup-1910-1999