Background
BERG, Elliot Joseph was born in 1927 in New York City, New York, United States of America.
BERG, Elliot Joseph was born in 1927 in New York City, New York, United States of America.
Bachelor of Arts New York University, New York City, New York, United States of America, 1949. Master of Arts Columbia University, 1955. Doctor of Philosophy Harvard University, 1960.
Field Organiser, New York Branch, United World Federalists, 1950-1951. Administration Staff, Foreign Policy Association, New York City, 1951-1952. Research Fellow, African Research and Studies Program, Boston University, 1954-1955.
Teaching Fellow, Assistant Professor of Economics, Harvard University, 1959-1964.
Project Director, Harvard Advisory Group, Liberia, 1964-1966. Professor of Economics, Director Center Economics Development, University Michigan,
1966-1983.
Consultant, World Bank, 1980-1981, Government Expenditure Analysis Division, International Monetary Fund, 1981-1982. Adjunct Professor, Georgetown University, 1983-1984, University ClermontFerrand, France, since 1979.
President, Elliot Berg Association, Alexandria, VI, United States of America, since 1982.
I became an economist because I was interested in world poverty — why countries grow or don’t grow. I started working on African problems mainly because my first preference, China, was not at that time open to outside study. Two perceptions emerged early in my career.
These I tried to explain to my students, and are now reflected in my analytic work and consulting. The first is that policy is a lot more important than most economists have ever allowed. This was especially evident in the field of development, which was from its infancy dominated by mechanistic models of the growth process.
The second perception is that organisational irrationality explains more of what happens in the world than any set of analytic propositions based on assumptions of ‘rational’ behaviour. Neither of these perceptions is particularly congenial to academic economics, which explains my decision to leave the academy (at least full-time) and concentrate on consulting. My main contributions in this work have been to offer candid assessments of policies and programmes, and, especially in recent years, to find ways that individual initiative and market forces can be harnessed more effectively in developing countries.