THE “HUMAN DEVELOPMENT” PARADIGM: ACUL-DE-SAC OF GOOD INTENTIONS?

Prof. Ashwani Saith

Ashwani Saith is Emeritus Professor at the International Institute of Social Studies, IISS(of Erasmus University Rotterdam, EUR) The Hague; Dean Emeritus, School of LiberalStudies, BML Munjal University (BMU), Gurugram; and Honorary Professor, Institute forHuman Development New Delhi. He obtained his PhD in Economics from Trinity College, Cambridge, UK, and has held research and teaching positions at various institutions including Delhi School of Economics, Cambridge, Oxford, and London School of Economics. He has also served as Professor of Rural Economics at IISS, The Hague, and held visiting professorships at Centre for Development Studies, Kerala; Rabindranath Tagore Centre for Human Development Studies, University of Calcutta; and Institute of Development Studies, Kolkata, among others.Saith's research and publications cover a wide range of topics including official poverty measurement methodologies, Millennium/Sustainable Development Goals, comparativeinstitutional analysis of China and India, policy frameworks for socio-economic security,structural change, macro-economic reforms, democracy, populism, plutarchy, agrarian change, rural development, ICTs, and migration. He has worked closely with organizations like SEWA, Ahmedabad, and MV Foundation, Hyderabad, on gender empowerment and the elimination of child labor. His recent research focuses on the history of economic thought, particularly on the evolution of Cambridge economics in the post-Keynesian era and Asian economic development with a comparative focus on China and India since 1950.

Dr. Amr Adly

Assistant Professor, Political Science Department,AUC

Amr Adly is Assistant Professor in the department of political science at The American University in Cairo (AUC). He worked as a researcher at the Middle East directions program at the European University Institute. He worked as a non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Middle East Center, where his research centered on political economy, development studies, and economic sociology of the Middle East, with a focus on Egypt.

Adly has taught political economy at AUC and Stanford University. He has also worked as a project manager at the center of democracy, development, and the rule of law at Stanford University, where he was a postdoctoral fellow.Adly is the author of cleft capitalism: the social origins of failed market-making in Egypt(Stanford University Press, 2020) and state reform and development in the Middle East: the cases of Turkey and Egypt (Routledge, 2012). He has been published in several peer-reviewed journals, including Geoforum, Business and Politics, the journal of TurkishStudies, and Middle Eastern Studies. Adly is also a frequent contributor to print and online news sources, including Bloomberg, Jadaliyya, and Al-Shorouk.