Development Economics (DE) rose to prominence as a separate sub-discipline in economics in the 1950s. Some would say that it had its heyday in the 1960s and early 1970s, and that from the mid 1970s it was on the wane. In certain senses, this is true. For instance, fewer First World students showed an interest in the Third World, and this affected the popularity of development courses. There has also been a blurring of the demarcation lines between development economics and other sub-disciplines of economics. Thirdly, DE initially achieved considerable lustre and excitement because people thought that it could slay the dragon of backwardness. By the 1970s, greater realism was setting in. As Sen (1983, p. 745) put it: ‘the would-be dragon slayer seems to have stumbled on his sword’. Yet this is all rather misleading. The important fact is that both the quantity and quality of research on less developed economies has continued to increase.