The development economist Michael Lipton, who has died aged 86, credited an important part of his education to the people of the village of Kavathe in Maharashtra state, India. His research there in 1965-66 anchored a lifetime devoted to understanding, explaining and advocating for poor rural people around the world.
Rather than being backward and conservative as some supposed, such communities acted rationally and managed resources efficiently. In his paper The Theory of the Optimising Peasant (1968), Michael explained that poor, small farmers were often reluctant to adopt new varieties of wheat and rice such as those rolled out in the green revolution of the mid-20th century, despite the average yield being higher than that of traditional varieties. This was because when the new varieties failed, because of drought or disease, they did so more spectacularly than traditional varieties, and thus increased the risk of hunger and destitution. When later generations of the green revolution crops reduced the risk, poor farmers adopted them with enthusiasm.
Michael also showed that in land-scarce situations, poor farmers managed the land more intensively and more efficiently than richer ones; and he debunked the idea that poor farmers were wasteful, showing that grain losses on farms were often minimal.
These ideas helped overturn the idea that national development could only come via industrialisation, at the expense, usually via high taxation, of rural areas. Michael’s big book, Why Poor People Stay Poor: Urban Bias and World Development (1977), set out to map in detail the ways in which urban-focused elites and policymakers discriminated against the rural poor.
In other work, Michael crossed the boundaries of disciplines to explore the linkages between agriculture, health and nutrition. In a short book for the World Health Organisation with Emanuel de Kadt, Agriculture-Health Linkages (1988), the authors demonstrated how the health and nutrition of rural people were shaped by agricultural policy: what was grown, at what price, and where. They showed how to make agricultural policymaking and institutions more responsive to the health needs of poor people, especially women, in rural areas.
Michael’s interest in development economics was sparked by Paul Streeten at Oxford, and by research for Gunnar Myrdal, author of what eventually became Asian Drama: An Inquiry Into the Poverty of Nations (1968). In 1966 he married Merle Babrow, a historian and political analyst from South Africa, and they shared a long-term interest in rural development and social change there.
The countries he advised included India and Bangladesh, Ethiopia and Sudan, Botswana and South Africa. He worked with banks, aid agencies and foundations, and in 2001 was the main author of the first Rural Poverty report for the International Fund for Agricultural Development. Characteristic of his initiatives were market-based approaches to land reform in southern Africa, seeking to overturn the historic inequity of land appropriation by colonial interests while avoiding violent conflict.
Born in London, Michael was the son of Helen and Leslie Lipton, émigrés from Hamburg. From Haberdashers’ school, then in Hampstead, he went on to Balliol College, Oxford, where he gained a first in philosophy, politics and economics (1960), and to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
He was an elected fellow of All Souls, Oxford (1961-68 and 1983-84), and held professorial posts at both the Institute of Development Studies in Brighton and at the University of Sussex. He was founding director of the university’s Poverty Research Unit (1994-97), now the Centre for Poverty and Inequality Research. He also had attachments with the World Bank and the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington, where he was director of the consumption and nutrition division (1987-89).
In 2003 Michael was appointed CMG; in 2006 he was elected a fellow of the British Academy; and in 2012 he won the Leontief prize, for contributions to economic theory that address contemporary realities and support just and sustainable societies.
He was devoted to his family, and to classical music, running and chess. On the last of these, he published a number of books, including the co-authored The Two-Move Chess Problem (1966), and Collected Chess Problems of Michael Lipton (2016). From 2000 to 2002 he was president of the British Chess Problem Society.
In his professional relationships Michael was rigorous and uncompromising, but he was also hospitable, generous and sympathetic.
Merle died in 2022. Michael is survived by his son, Emanuel, and his grandson, Joshua.
• Michael Lipton, development economist, born 13 February 1937; died 1 April 2023
