My friend John Toye, who has died aged 79, was director of the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex (1987-97) and of the Centre for Study of African Economies at Oxford (2000–03). However, “development economist” does not properly describe him: he was also a historian, political scientist and sociologist.
When I first met him in the early 1980s, I was looking for someone who could help me understand the World Bank’s attempt, during those years of global depression, to impose free-market policies on developing countries. My proposal of partnership luckily was accepted, and eventually emerged as Aid and Power (1991), written by John and myself, and Jane Harrigan, and provided the basis for a 40-year friendship.
The 1980s were a turning-point for John, which strongly influenced much of his later work. In his book Dilemmas of Development (1987), he characterised the approach of influential free-market advocates of the time as “first turn liberty against equality and fraternity, then overthrow liberty itself”: a sombre prophecy which exactly describes not only the behaviour of many rightwing regimes in the 1980s and 90s but also the governments of modern-day India, Nigeria and Brazil, and most notoriously the behaviour of the Trump administration in the US.
John was born in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, the son of Jack, a teacher, and Adele (nee Francis), a social worker. He went to Christ’s college, Finchley, in north London, then read history at Cambridge, achieving a starred first in his final year. He was a Treasury civil servant between 1965 and 1968, and from then on a development specialist, at Cambridge (1972-80), Swansea (1982-87) and then Sussex.
His last published work, The Counterrevolution in Development Economics, a chapter in the book The Political Economy of Development Economics: A Historical Perspective (2018), edited by Michele Alacevich and Mauro Boianovsky. This is a backward look to the themes explored in Dilemmas of Development and describes the damage that economists of the last three decades have done to the concept of development economics. In our judgment George Akerlof’s 1970 idea of market failure can and has been used by many economists, of whom Akerlof and Nicholas Stern are outstanding examples, to explain why public policies still need to be more interventionist in developing than in industrialised countries.
John was not only an outstanding development expert, but also a brilliantly kind, generous and versatile person. His support for me extended from identifying flaws in my economic models to showing me how to improvise a bedtime story for my children when they were little.
He is survived by his wife, Janet (nee Reason), whom he married in 1967, and their children, Eleanor and Richard.
