Few first-hand accounts on advising exist by government advisors working in Third World countries. Other writers suggest that such advising is different from that found in the governments o f the industrialized countries. A framework for comparing expatriate advisors in Africa with senior policy analysts in the United States is developed which finds a great deal of similarity between the two types of advisors. Examples are drawn from the literature (much of it fugitive) about advisors and policy analysts working in Africa, Europe, and the United States.

The expatriate advisor as senior policy analyst

This chapter discusses the similarities and differences in the plurality of practices regarding the use of interviews by historians of economics – i.e., either the use of someone else's interviews as sources or the use of interviews conducted by the historian for her or his work. It draws on methodological and historiographical contributions from other disciplines where the use of interviews is more systematic to characterize the practices in our discipline and to sometimes suggest further or new developments. The characterizations of the use of interviews by historians of economics focus on three interrelated factors that impact the relation between the historian (potentially as an interviewer) and her or his sources (i.e., the interviewee): (1) the goals of the research project for which interviews are used, (2) the potentially perceived threats to scientific credit and legitimacy that history of contemporary science can trigger for some scientists and (3) the specificities of oral sources compared to more traditional written sources. Word count (without bibliography and appendix): 8249 1

Interviews and the Historiographical Issues of Oral Sources

This paper discusses the similarities and differences in the plurality of practices regarding the use of interviews by historians of economics – i.e., either the use of someone else's interviews as sources or the use of interviews conducted by the historian for her or his work.

https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-01651053/document

A. W. Coats

Papers

Economists in Government: A Research Field for the Historian of Economics