The idea of establishing the Institute of Development Economics emerged in 1957 in Karachi through the efforts of concerned public servants and philanthropists in response to the felt need for research on national and international problems of Development Economics, a discipline which itself was in a formative stage and to which PIDE’s existence unwittingly contributed. PIDE became one of the first centres of Development Economics that sprouted in the 1960s in the wake of the rising interest in the problems of economic development in the postwar period, soon after attention shifted from the reconstruction of war-ravaged Europe through the Marshall Plan to the more persistent problems of underdevelopment in developing countries.