John Adams and Sabiha Iqbal. Exports, Politics and Economic Development. Boulder,Colorado: Westview Press, 1983.

Abstract

Political economy is the systematic study of the interaction between the political and the economic. As such, political economy imposes a heavy burden on it s practitioners: conscious attention to the very real advances of political science and economics. Political economy should not be treated as an open invitation to bad analysis in the name of cross-disciplinary effort. Sadly, it is often taken for just such an invitation and the book under review here is a good example. Adams and Iqbal propose to present a political- economic analysis of Pakistan's economic development with particular emphasis on export policy. Such a study may have two rather different constituencies: country specialists and/or development and political economy generalists. The former is clearly not the case. The political analysis derives almost entirely from existing secondary sources and the economic discussion is theoretical, ad hoc and based on readily available data. Thus we may presume that the contribution is to be found in the particular theoretical or methodological app roach and, therefore, of interest to generalists as well as specialists.