Raphael Kaplinsky
Raphael Kaplinsky (1946- ) was born in South Africa to Polish Jews who had migrated from the town of Slonim (then in Poland, now in Belarus), to South Africa in 1929.
As a student, Kaplinsky took part in Cape Town University’s anti-apartheid protests which resulted in him having to flee South Africa to the United Kingdom in the 1960s
He arrived at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex (UK) in 1969 where he coordinated the Industrialisation and Globalisation teams, directed three cohorts of the MPhil Programme and played a central role in helping to define and implement the strategic direction of the IDS. In 2006 he moved to the Open University, assisting the development group there to define its research agenda, and in 2015 returned to the IDS where he is now an Emeritus Fellow.
Kaplinsky has produced an enormous body of work in the field of economic development. In this chapter from The Economics of Small (1990) he analyzes the prospects for economic production on a human sale, and challenges the prevailing belief in the superior efficiency of large scale development in the Industrially Advanced Countries (IACs) and Developing Countries (DCs) His most recent popular work is Sustainable Futures: An Agenda for Action (Wiley: 2021).