Abstract
Sir W. Arthur Lewis was born on the island of St Lucia. He taught political economics at several universities and worked at the United Nations in the 1950s, before embarking on a career at Princeton. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for economics in 1979, jointly with T.W. Schultz, for their work on development economics. The article reports on the meeting of economists convened in 1969 by the ILO, the aim of which was to advise the Organization on research priorities for the World Employment Programme. The economists discussed the possible macroeconomic causes of unemployment in less developed countries, including overpopulation, restrictions on exports, overvalued foreign exchange rates, low levels of productivity and an excessive propensity to import. While things have changed since then, some of these issues remain in the current economic debate on development, particularly exchange rates and the role of trade. As Lewis notes in his conclusion: “Much of the problem has to do with macroeconomic policies rather than with gimmicks here and there.”