50 Years of World Development
Araral E. Orazgaliyev S.
April 2026Elsevier Ltd
World Development
2026#200
Since its launch in 1973, World Development (WD) has both reflected and challenged prevailing development paradigms. We provide the first longitudinal, replicable portrait of WDs intellectual landscape and its influence on global development discourse. Leveraging correlated topic modelling (CTM) and bibliometrics, this study maps the journals full research archive (8,711 articles) from 1973 to 2022. We identify five major thematic waves—from basic–needs economics to climate–resilient sustainability—trace their co–evolution with the World Development Report (WDR), and spotlight how WD scholarship often anticipates WDR agendas by two to five years. Region–specific analyses reveal distinctive research trajectories for China, India, Africa and Latin America, while authorship data show a six–fold rise in womens representation. We conclude with a research agenda for the next decade emphasizing the importance of keeping WDs core intellectual history in development economics even as it diversifies into development studies.
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National University of Singapore, Singapore
Nazarbayev University, Kazakhstan
National University of Singapore
Nazarbayev University
10 лет помогаем публиковать статьи Международный издатель
Книга Публикация научной статьи Волощук 2026 Book Publication of a scientific article 2026