First edition. 8vo. 122 pp. Original green cloth cloth, spine lettered in gilt, dust jacket (neat ownership inscription and small bookseller’s lable to front pastedown, otherwise internally clean and unmarked; slight lean to text block, spine panel of jacket faintly toned, small amount of faint brown marking to rear panel, still an excellent copy overall). Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1960.
Sen’s first book, addressing the difficulties in choosing a system of economic planning for an underdeveloped country. ‘It made rigorous a series of arguments that had often been advanced casually concerning the need for ‘appropriate’ (labourintensive) technology in poor and populous countries’ (New Palgrave). Much of the content was taken from his dissertation written for a Prize Fellowship of Trinity College Cambridge during 1955-57.
