The post-WWII era saw a global surge in the circulation and dissemination of theories of economic development inspired by the work of British economist John Keynes. How did these global ideas circulate and metamorphose in a Middle Eastern context? In this paper, I trace the post-WWII rise of a group of scholar-technocrats, whom I refer to as developmental institutionalists, that were based at the American University of Beirut (AUB) in Lebanon. Most of these scholars, like Said Himadeh, Yusif Sayigh, and Salim Hoss, studied in the United State and returned to the Arab World where they held high ranking positions in education and the bureaucracy. As I argue in this paper, these economists were not simply emissaries but equally transformers of global currents of economic thought. Their models for economic development combined elements of Keynesianism with those of US-based Wesley Mitchell’s economic institutionalism in order to address the challenges of state-building under the banner of Arab or Lebanese nationalism. They applied these new ideas to pressing questions such as state financial regulation in underdeveloped money markets and ideal central banking prototypes for emerging nations. The influence of the AUB economists transcended Lebanon and was linked to the rise of the Arab oil economy. At the centre of this influence lay the institutional role of the Beirut-based Economic Research Institute (ERI, est. 1953) and its academic journal of record, the Middle East Economic Papers (MEEP). In the first decade of its operation, ERI was involved in training over a hundred junior government officials from across the Arab world in statistical methods as part of a multi-national effort based in Beirut. MEEP acted as a catalyst for the creation of transnational currents of intellectual exchange and influence within the Arab and Muslim Middle East that spanned Karachi, Tehran, Baghdad, Istanbul, Cairo, and Khartoum. A better understanding of these networks and the philosophy behind them will shed new light on how global thought shapes and is shaped by local and regional contexts. More specifically, it contributes to a further elaboration of the evolution of Arab economic thought rarely features in histories of modern Arab intellectual renaissance, the Nahda. My conclusions are based on extensive archival research of US diplomatic cables, correspondence records of the Ford Foundation that funded ERI, as well as a detailed survey of the writings of these scholars including their publications in MEEP.