Development economist Peter Bauer denied a shortage of entrepreneurs in the global South

Evidence

Kirzner’s observations about real-life entrepreneurs were foreshadowed by neoliberal interventions in the debate over international development. Since the end of the 1950s, development economist and MPS member Peter Bauer had used a sociological perspective akin to Schumpeter to decry the notion of a lack of entrepreneurs in developing countries—a view also shared by important Mont Pèlerin members like Wilhelm Röpke. Ignoring progressive critics who emphasized a shortage of (domestic) capital rather than a lack of entrepreneurs, Bauer’s emphasis on the market process and entrepreneurship in the South sought to advance a universal neoliberal economic perspective in the field of development economics. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 278

Categorization

• XREF: This is the development-economics front of the same anti-planning, market-process campaign, echoing the internal-debate themes across the volume. — connects to: Bauer rejected the developed-underdeveloped dichotomy and vicious-cycle-of-poverty analysis as fallacious — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 1314
• SEED: Bauer vs. the capital-shortage school of development economics is a compact case study in how an ideological commitment inverts a policy diagnosis — an essay angle on the intellectual origins of the entrepreneurial-development rhetoric still dominant today.

Broader Connections

• Bauer rejected the developed-underdeveloped dichotomy and vicious-cycle-of-poverty analysis as fallacious #expands (0.75) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1314