On Celso Furtado and the French influences found in his development economics

Abstract

This inquiry seeks to establish the importance of Celso Furtado’s exposure to sets of ideas espoused especially by François Perroux, Maurice Byé, and Bertrand Nogaro; three thinkers lauded as exponents steeped in what can be identified as a distinctly French tradition in Economic Science. In the late 1940s when Furtado was a doctoral student at La Sorbonne in Paris, he studied under these three professors, and their ideas appear to have wielded profound influences over his in formation and later emergence as a major figure in development economics. Their influences appear initially in the focus and method employed in his doctoral dissertation. With his return to South America in 1949, we can find their influences in the emergence of his approach to Latin American Structuralism, and later with his long-term theoretical and policy interests focused upon what he identifies as “economic underdevelopment.”