Kirzner's observations about real-life entrepreneurs were foreshadowed by neoliberal interventions in the debate over international development. Since the end of the 1950s, development economist and MPS member Peter Bauer had used a sociological perspective akin to Schumpeter to decry the notion of a lack of entrepreneurs in developing countries—a view also shared by important Mont Pèlerin members like Wilhelm Röpke. Ignoring progressive critics who emphasized a shortage of (domestic) capital rather than a lack of entrepreneurs, Bauer's emphasis on the market process and entrepreneurship in the South sought to advance a universal neoliberal economic perspective in the field of development economics.

Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, loc. 278