Planning and Productivity in Sweden (1976) examines the success of Sweden’s economy and working arrangements, detailing how a resource-poor nation came to achieve such high living standards. The growth in prosperity was no accident, but involved conscious acts of policy by management, by unions, and occasionally by government.

Walter Birmingham studied economics under some of the leading economists of the 1930s at the London School of Economics. In the 1950s, as an academic at what is now the University of Ghana, he applied his Keynesian understanding of the morality of economic theory to the issues faced by Africa on the colonial Gold Coast. His learning was condensed into his book Introduction to Economics which became a standard student text. In the 1960s, when Planning and Growth in Rich and Poor Countries was first published, Walter Birmingham was based back in the UK where he succeeded in persuading the World Council of Churches that, in imitation of the British Welfare State, the industrial nations of the rich world should share their resources with the 'Third World' of slowly developing nations. A generation later he was further able to persuade a newly elected British Labour government that it should devote one per cent of its tax income to a Ministry for Overseas Development, deemed by some to be the party's most radical innovation. Thereafter Walter Birmingham returned to Africa where he spent the last decade of his professorial career.