Career
Kurt Mandelbaum (also known as Kurt Martin) was one of a group of emigre economists from Central Europe who played a large role in founding the discipline of development economics in the United Kingdom, during and shortly after World World War World War II In general these economists doubted the usefulness of neoclassical economics with its presumptions of smoothly operating markets and saw the role of the state as being key to the development process. The industrialization debates in the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics in the 1920s were their starting point. During the war worked with allied intelligence and subsequently joined the Oxford Institute of Statistics.
Whilst at Oxford he undertook his study of the problems of recovery in South.E. Europe.
This small book which was to become one of core texts for the new discipline, stressed
the need to mobilize savings,
the need for infrastructure,
the extent of disguised rural unemployment,
the need for calculating inter-industry calculations (anticipating the use of input-output analysis). After retiring from Manchester he worked for a further seventeen years at the Institute of Social Studies at The Hague.
