TN Srinivasan and the lasting influence of the Handbook of Development Economics

That first volume of the Handbook, co-edited by Srinivasan and Harvard economist Hollis Chenery, asked whether development economics diverged from the assumptions and tools of mainstream economics. Did studying lower-income countries require different models of growth and new analytical approaches? Given the urgent need for policy advice, how should the field work amid the lack of strong empirical frameworks?

“Policy making cannot wait for such a framework to be enunciated and tested,” Srinivasan wrote in that first volume. “In the meantime, the more robust of the conclusions of partial analysis can be usefully employed in policy formulation.”

Srinivasan brought the same intellectual rigor to a distinguished academic career and to his role in India’s economic liberalization during the 1990s, after several decades of anti-trade policies. His wide-ranging scholarship focused on how economic policies in lower income countries could improve people’s lives. He and Chenery also co-edited the Handbook’s second volume, and Srinivasan co-edited the third volume with Jere Behrman, the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Economics at the University of Pennsylvania.

“T.N. was in many ways an ideal colleague and mentor as well as a model of a scientist with a global sense of responsibility,” recalled Rosenzweig to the Yale Daily News after Srinivisan died in 2018. “What I most admired about T.N., besides his important scientific contributions to international trade and development economics, was how the rigor of his scholarship extended to his many discussions with high-level policy-makers, bureaucrats, colleagues, and students.

Srinivasan came to Yale in 1957, after earning a master’s degree in mathematics from the University of Madras and working as a statistician at the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) in Calcutta under statistician C. R. Rao. While at ISI, he met visiting American mathematician Albert Turner Bharucha-Reid and shared his interest in studying linear programming theory with Yale economist Tjalling Koopmans, later a Nobel laureate. Bharucha-Reid provided encouragement – and Koopmans’s address. 

In August 1956, Srinivasan wrote to Koopmans about admission to Yale’s doctoral program. Koopmans, perhaps impressed by Srinivasan’s work with Rao, forwarded the letter to the Dean of Graduate Studies. The following year, Srinivasan arrived in New Haven to study under Koopmans, with funding from the Ford Foundation (which also supported the establishment of EGC in 1961). 

He earned his PhD in 1962, then returned to India to work in the Planning Commission and later as a professor at ISI. In 1979, he joined Yale’s economics department, serving as Chair from 1997 to 2000, and remained a professor until his retirement in 2011.

Among his many contributions to the field, Srinivasan’s legacy of intellectual rigor and policy engagement endures through the Handbook. It has been an essential resource for early-career scholars and experienced researchers alike. 

For instance, Dean Karlan – professor of economics and finance at Northwestern University, former chief economist of USAID, and a contributor to the Handbook’s fifth volume – sees it as a valuable reflection of the field’s collective knowledge. “If I'm embarking on a project that's venturing into new territories, it’s a good way to take stock of what we know about a certain topic, and what the gaps are,” he said. 

The Handbook is particularly useful for younger researchers. Andrew Foster, now a professor of economics at Brown University, recalls closely reading every chapter of the first Handbook as a new PhD, seeing it as a crucial guide to the field. “In the first two-thirds of that first volume, you see the old development economics,” he said. “Then the final section focuses on human capital, nutrition, education – that’s where the field’s growth started.” 

Over the years, the Handbook has charted the field’s evolution, particularly researchers’ increased access to macroeconomic and micro-level household data. “The availability of data, particularly data on impact evaluations, has shifted the field towards more impact evaluation, more randomized control trials, more experiments,” said Agnes Quisumbing, a Senior Research Fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) – who contributed to the Handbook’s fourth volume with coauthor Marcel Fafchamps. 

The later volumes have also underscored the growing policy orientation of development economics. Volume 5 was organized around how research can inform specific policy areas and which issues merit the field’s focus. Likewise, while poverty and inequality were not substantially addressed in the first two volumes, they have since become central concerns. The environment has also emerged as a major focus, with increasing attention to how climate change disproportionately affects poor communities.

For many contributors and readers, the Handbook remains an enduring reference. Quisumbing notes that she still has the physical copies on her shelves. “It's one of the few things that I have in hard copy, rather than electronically,” she said

On September 4-5, development experts from around the world gathered on the Yale campus to discuss the Handbook’s forthcoming sixth volume and discuss new trends and challenges in the field. 

Co-hosted by EGC and Yale Inclusion Economics in collaboration with the MacMillan Center’s South Asian Studies Council, the event featured the volume’s contributors presenting research on urgent, policy-relevant topics. These included how climate breakdowns limit the benefits of growth, as well as how globalization and changes in production technologies, including AI, are reshaping global production, altering the distribution of labor and capital, and shifting patterns of inequality and poverty both within and across countries. Commentary from discussants and attendees will help contributors refine their chapters ahead of the volume’s anticipated publication in 2026. 

Goldberg said that the new edition is motivated by two considerations. First, over the last decade, development research has flourished throughout the discipline of economics. “Now almost every subfield has one foot in Development,” she said. 

Second, fundamental shifts in the global environment from factors including climate change, new technologies such as AI, and geopolitical tensions such as those between the US and China are likely to have profound effects on developing countries. 

“Economic development has evolved tremendously over the last fifteen or twenty years,” Pande said. “The motivation of this Handbook is to focus on the changing nature of economic growth, inequality, and politics, and examine what that may mean for development policy going ahead.”

“The new edition aims to do justice both to the richness of new research and the realities of this changing economic landscape,” Goldberg added