New Delhi: Michael Lipton, specialising in rural poverty in developing countries, including issues relating to land reform and urban bias, died on April 1. He spent much of his career at the University of Sussex, but also contributed to the work of international institutions, such as the World Bank’s 2000-2001 World Development Report on poverty. Lipton was the author of Why Poor People Stay Poor.
In Financial Times, emeritus professor of international studies at Simon Fraser University, Professor John Harriss writes that his great contribution to his discipline was recognised in 2012, when he was awarded the Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought. “Early on in his career, Lipton focused on redistributive land reform. He laid out the case for it in a significant International Labour Organization report on the development of Sri Lanka in 1971, and in his last major book, Land Reform in Developing Countries: Property Rights and Property Wrongs, which was published in 2009. Lipton explained how the agriculture sector generally, small producers especially, and in consequence development as a whole, were harmed by what he described as “urban bias”. He held that this was, as the title of his 1977 book stated, Why Poor People Stay Poor,” says Harriss.
Harriss writes that Lipton was drawn to development economics when he began working with Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal, on his pioneering institutional study of development issues in South Asia, Asian Drama: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations (1968). “From that point on, India was central to Lipton’s research, though he also worked in other countries in Asia. He spent time in Africa too, particularly in Botswana, where he was an adviser to the government between 1977 and 1979, and in South Africa. In his work with Myrdal, Lipton found existing micro-level research inadequate for understanding the problems of agricultural development, and it was in addressing this limitation that he began his field work in India.”
Melissa Leach, Director of Institute of Development Studies, at the University of Sussex where he was appointed a professorial fellow in 1967, and worked for 30 years said, “Michael has long been an icon of Development Studies, of Development Economics, and of IDS. A brilliant scholar, formidable intellect and polymath, his paradigm-shifting contributions, from Urban Bias and Village Studies to his myriad works on agriculture and rural development have helped define our field.” In 1994, Lipton established the Poverty Research Unit at Sussex.
1937-born Lipton’s German Jewish parents had left Hamburg for the UK in 1933.
