Showing 3 results

Archival description
University of Toronto Archives and Records Management Services (UTARMS) Gerald Karl Helleiner fonds Series
Print preview View:

Manuscripts and publications

Professor Helleiner is the author or editor of 18 books, over 100 refereed articles and contributions to volumes, even more non-refereed publications, many book reviews, and some letters to the editor. This series does not contain a complete record of his output or copies of all of his manuscripts. Some files may contain a comprehensive record of the writing of a particular piece, including correspondence with colleagues (Professor Helleiner habitually ran his drafts by them) and/or publishers, contracts, notes and notebooks, drafts of manuscripts and comments on them, offprints, reviews, and royalty statements. Others may contain only the contract, perhaps a letter or two, or a review, but no manuscripts or offprints.

Some of Professor Helleiner's writing have been translated into other languages, including French, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Spanish, and Swedish.

For the three WIDER volumes that Professor Helleiner edited and for which he wrote introductions and/or chapters, see Series 6.

Professional associations and posts

The records in this series document Professor Helleiner’s association with and involvement in several dozen professional associations and organizations, including consulting contracts with governments and educational bodies. There are also files on many of the journals with which he was associated (he sat on the editorial boards of more than twenty at one time or another, one (World Development) for more than thirty years. Most of the latter contain his comments on papers he was asked to assess. There are also files on some conferences that he attended.

The files contain correspondence, memoranda, notes, minutes of meetings and proceedings of workshops, reports (many written by Helleiner), conference programmes and papers, the occasional interview, and selected newsletters and press clippings. The arrangement is by name of organization or event, filed alphabetically.

The most extensive files are on the following organizations, the binding thread being development economics: African Capacity Building Foundation and the African Economic Research Consortium; with officials and politicians of the Government of Canada and about the Canadian International Development Agency; the Commonwealth Secretariat, the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), and International Lawyers and Economists Against Poverty (ILEAP); the North South Institute, the Overseas Development Council (USA), and the North South Roundtable of the Society for International Development (UK); various activities relating to trade and investment in South Africa (including early opposition to it), and ongoing activities in Tanzania (see below); numerous bodies associated with the United Nations (especially UNICEF and UNCTAD); several universities (Dar es Salaam, Sussex, and the West Indies); the World Bank, and World Development.

The International Development Research Centre (IDRC), founded in Ottawa in 1970, was mandated to support research on the reduction of global poverty and particularly research in (as well as for) developing countries.” It was initially headed by David Hopper, with whom Professor Helleiner worked on the creation of the North-South Institute in 1975-1976. He sat on the Board of the IDRC from 1985 to 1991.

ILEAP grew out of concerns Professor Helleiner raised in his Prebisch lecture at UNCTAD in December, 2000 about the lack of lawyers (and economists) “committed…to the specially defence of the rights of the poorest in the global economy’s legal system and the building of their capacity of defend themselves.” His call was taken up by Ron Daniels, dean of Law at the U of T, and others, with initial funding from the IDRC.

Professor Helleiner’s long association with Tanzania is well documented here, beginning in 1978 with the Government of Tanzania Task Force on Export Incentive Schemes, followed by the Tanzania Advisory Group (“Three Wise Men”) in 1981 and ending,
between 1994 and 2000, with the Group of Independent Advisors on Development Cooperation Issues Between Tanzania and its Aid Donors (which Helleiner chaired) and the associated Tanzania Advisory Strategy.

Additional correspondence on many of these organizations may be found filed under the names of the individual members in Series 2: Correspondence, an example being Roy Culpepper of the North-South Institute.

Of the more than twenty editorial boards on which Professor Helleiner sat, the most extensive files are for International Organization and WorldDevelopment. The files together contain primarily specially ng relating to his membership on editorial boards and/or his appraisals of papers presented to the respective journals. Some related correspondence may be found in ‘Series 2: Correspondence’ under the names of editorial board members.

Professor Helleiner’s involvement with the Intergovernmental Group of Twenty-four on International Monetary Affairs (Group of 24 or G-24) is documented in Series 7 and with WIDER (World Institute for Development Economic Research) in Series 6.

In his curriculum vitae [B2010-0005/001(01) and /019(05)], Professor Helleiner provides lists of “Journal editorial boards”, “Other professional honours and posts”, and “sample selected research contracts and consultancies”. Researchers will find these lists very useful in gaining an understanding of the breadth of Professor Helleiner’s professional activities, while some indication of the depth of his involvement can be gleaned from his memoirs, Listening and learning [B2010-0005/079(02)].

World Institute for Development Economics Research (WIDER)

In 1984 the director of the World Institute for Development Economics Research (WIDER), newly established by the United Nations University (UNU) and based in Helsinki, invited scholars, of whom Professor Helleiner was one, to organize interesting research projects using WIDER’s funds and under its auspices. The following year, Helleiner, along with Lance Taylor and others, began to develop a research programme on international economic issues and helped organize a high level conference to flesh out its direction. The programme that emerged involved papers on 18 developing countries, the summary volume of which appeared in 1988.

By 1990, Professor Helleiner had assembled a number of developing country authors and empirically-oriented trade/development analysts to work out a research project on trade and industrialization policies. It produced two books which he edited and for which he wrote the introductions. The first, on trade and industrialization reconsidered, appeared as Trade policy and industrialization in turbulent times in 1994. Papers presented at the WIDER conferences on ‘trade and industrialization’ held in Ottawa in September 1991 and on ‘Trade and industrialization reconsidered’ held in Paris in August the same year formed the basis of this volume. Papers on Nigeria, Pakistan and Zimbabwe were not received in time for inclusion in it. A second, shorter volume, containing only five country studies but built on the work of the first, appeared in 1995 as Manufacturing for export in the developing world: problems and possibilities.

A second WIDER project, on new trade theories and industrialization in the developing countries, was begun in 1988 and published as Trade policy, industrialization and development: new perspectives in 1992.

The third project, on non-traditional exporting from Africa, focused on the following countries: Burkino Fasso, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Kenya., Mauritius, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda and Zimbabwe, with comparative studies on Chile and Costa Rica. Professor Helleiner worked closely with the African Economic Research Consortium’s (AERC) trade liberalization project and with the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). The project began in July 1996 and ran until late 1999. Papers were presented at a joint UNU/WIDER meeting in Kampala, Uganda, in June 1997 and they were subsequently reworked into chapters for the book, Non-traditional export promotion in Africa: experience and issues, which appeared in 2002. The series ends with a proposed project on the United Nations and the Breton Woods Institutions.

This series contains correspondence, memoranda, notes, minutes of meetings, conference material, drafts of papers, reports and publications.