GDI Lecture: The Myth of Deindustrialisation and the Possibilities for Development within Industrial Civilisation
| Dates: | 3 December 2025 |
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| Times: | 16:30 - 18:00 |
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| What is it: | Lecture |
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| Organiser: | Global Development Institute |
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Speaker: Andrew Fischer, International Institute of Social Studies (ISS)
This lecture draws from Celso Furtado's classic, Accumulation and Development: the logic of industrial civilisation (tr. 1983) in framing the centrality of industrialisation for understanding economic development and the fundamental differences between centres and peripheries within the ongoing evolution of the international economic order. In laying out this argument, Fischer also challenges the accepted conventions around the idea of deindustrialisation, arguing that the common measures used are better understood as reflections of ongoing advances of industrialisation rather than their opposite. In this context, the possibilities of development are very much predicated on the demand side, or more specifically, on scaling up redistributive processes within spheres of circulation, as counterweight to the rapid leaps in productivity and concentration in the productive spheres of the global economy. Redistribution in this sense needs to be understood as inherent to the development process itself; conversely, the undermining of redistribution has been at the heart of the crisis of development in the first place.
Prof. Dr. Andrew M. Fischer is Professor of Inequality, Social Protection, and Development at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) and Chair of the journal Development and Change. Trained in demography and development economics, he has worked extensively on poverty, inequality, social policy, and international development for over 30 years, with field experience spanning Latin America, Africa, and Asia, including extended periods living in India, Nepal, and China. He earned his PhD in Development Studies from the London School of Economics (LSE), focusing on China’s regional development strategies in western China and their impact on ethnic minorities. Professor Fischer is the author of the award-winning 2018 book, Poverty as Ideology, which received the International Studies in Poverty Prize from the Comparative Research Programme on Poverty (CROP) and Zed Books. His current research is broadly focused on the interactions of redistribution with finance and production in development, with many tangents that he has yet to assemble into one coherent whole.
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