The contributors draw on their extensive experience as advisers to the Pakistan Planning Commission. Walter Falcon and Joseph J. Stern provide a general summary of Pakistan's development. The well-documented volume then focuses on specific economic issues. Stern analyzes inter-regional income differences and the trade-off between growth and regional equity. G. C. Hufbauer discusses West Pakistan's rapidly increasing exports, as well as effective subsidies and taxation, costs, and discrimination among exports. Henry D. Jacoby examines the application of a model to the planning of a whole power system. Robert Repetto is concerned with costs involved in designing an irrigation system. Falcon and Carl H. Gotsch study Punjab agriculture, the rationality of Punjabi farmers and their responses to prices and technological change. John W. Thomas provides important empirical evidence on a program to provide employment: the rural public works of East Pakistan. Gustav Papanek, former Director of the Development Advisory Service, discusses the occupational background and financing of Pakistan's industrial entrepreneurs and the relationship between their education and their success.

In 1965, a group of economists at Harvard University established the Project for Quantitative Research in Economic Development in the Center for International Affairs. Brought together by a common background of fieldwork in developing countries and a desire to apply modern techniques of quantitative analysis to the policy problems of these countries, they produced this volume, which represents that part of their research devoted to formulating operational ways of thinking about development problems.

The seventeen essays are organized into four sections: General Planning Models, International Trade and External Resources, Sectoral Planning, and Empirical Bases for Development Programs. They raise some central questions: To what extent can capital and labor substitute for each other? Does development require fixed inputs of engineers and other specialists in each sector or are skills highly substitutable? Is the trade gap a structural phenomenon or merely evidence of an overvalued exchange rate? To what extent do consumers respond to changes in relative prices?