He was Professorial Research Fellow at the UWI Graduate Institute of International Relations at the University of the West Indies in St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago. He was formerly the Secretary General of the Association of Caribbean States, Professor of Development Studies and Director of the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies at the University of the West Indies, and head of the National Planning Agency of the Government of Jamaica. Professor Girvan had done research and published on foreign investment and multinational corporations, the mining industry, technology, the IMF and external debt, social development, Caribbean integration, and economic thought. He also served on the Steering Committee of the , based at the , , Mexico.
Books and monographs
The Caribbean Bauxite Industry. Institute of Social and Economic Research, University of the West Indies, 1967, pp. 45.
"Multinational Corporations and Dependent Underdevelopment in Mineral-Export Economies", New Haven: Economic Growth Center, Yale University, Center Paper No. 182, 1970; also in Social and Economic Studies, 19, 4, pp. 490–526.
Foreign Capital and Economic Underdevelopment in Jamaica. ISER/UWI, 1971, pp. 282.
Copper in Chile: A Study in Conflict between Corporate and National Economy. ISER/UWI, 1972, pp. 86.
Corporate Imperialism, Conflict and Expropriation: Essays in Transnational Corporations and Economic Nationalism in the Third World. New York; Myron E. Sharpe, 1976; and Monthly Review Press, 1978. pp. 241.
"The IMF and the Third World: The Case of Jamaica". Uppsala: Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation, 1980, pp. 42. Also in Development Dialogue, 1980, 2; and in Spanish in Cuadernos Economico Trimestrales, No. 3, Havana; and extracts reprinted in Yash Ghai, Robin Luckam, and Francis Snyder, The Political Economy of Law: A Third World Reader. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987.
Technology Policies for Small Developing Economies: A Study of the Caribbean. ISER/UWI, 1983, pp. 224.
Managing International Technology Transfer: A Strategic Approach for Developing Countries. Ottawa: IDRC MR259e; April 1990, pp. 311.
The Debt Problem of Small Peripheral Economies: Case Studies of the Caribbean and Central America. Kingston: Association of Caribbean Economists in collaboration with Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, 1990.
"Societies at Risk? The Caribbean and Global Change". Paris: UNESCO, Management of Social Transformation Discussion Paper No. 17, 1997.
Aspects of the Political Economy of Race in the Caribbean and the Americas, Institute of the Black World, Atlanta, GA, 1975.
. Paper prepared for North-South Institute Project in Reform of the International Development Architecture, September 2007.
. Prepared for OECD Development Forum, Workshop on Ownership in Practice, Paris, 27 September 2007.
"Learning to Integrate: The Experience of Monitoring the CARICOM Single Market and Economy", in De Lombaerde, Philippe; Antoni Estevadeordal and Kati Suominen, Governing Regional Integration for Development: Monitoring Experiences, Methods and Prospects. Ashgate: 2008. Chapter 3, pp. 31–56.
Cooperation in the Greater Caribbean: The Role of the Association of Caribbean States. Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 2006; pp. 214.
"Lessons from the struggle for a new International Technology Order", in Henry Veltmeyer, Development in an Era of Neoliberal Globalization, Ashgate, 2013.
"Extractive imperialism in historical perspective", in Henry Veltmeyer, Extractive Imperialism in the Americas, Leiden: Brill, 2014.
