Michael Paul Todaro (born May 14, 1942) is an American economist and a pioneer in the field of development economics.
Todaro earned a PhD in economics from Yale University in 1968 for a thesis titled The Urban Employment Problem in Less Developed Countries – An Analysis of Demand and Supply.
In a special February 2011 centenary edition, the American Economic Review selected Todaro’s article “Migration, Unemployment and Development: A 2-Sector Analysis” (with John Harris) as one of the twenty most important articles published by that journal during the first one hundred years of its existence.
Todaro’s five years of living and teaching in Africa as well as two decades of extensive travel throughout Latin America and Asia, first as a director of the Rockefeller Foundation and then as a professor of economics at New York University helped shape and refine a book that is unique among development texts in approach, organization, and pedagogy.
The textbook Economic Development takes a policy-oriented approach, presenting economic theory in the context of critical policy debates and country-specific case studies to show how theory relates to the problems and prospects of developing countries.