Development Economics

This textbook provides a comprehensive, systematic treatise on development economics, combining classical political economy, modern institutional theory, and current development issues. It has grown out of twenty years' experience of teaching undergraduate and postgraduate students in the United States and Japan. The treatment is global, although the organizing principle is the East Asian development experience. Quantitative characteristics of Third World development in terms of population growth, natural resource depletion, capital accumulation, and technological change are outlined; but the central approach is comparative institutional analysis. "Development Economics" addresses one major question: Why has a small set of countries achieved a high level of affluence while the majority remain poor and stagnant? Why, in turn, has the number of developing economies set on the track of closing their productivity gap with advance economies been so limited?
One obvious factor underlying this global divergence is unevenness in the ability to adopt and develop advanced technology, due in large measure to the difficulty experienced by low-income economies in preparing appropriate institutions for borrowing advanced technology given their social and cultural constraints. The major task of this volume is to explore the nature of these binding constraints, with the aim of identifying the means to remove them. Comparisons are made with countries where the constraints have been successfully lifted-most notably Japan and East Asian NIEs. This fully revised and updated second edition also incorporates analyses of several recent changes and newly emerged problems relevant to the global economy: the 1997-98 financial crisis in East Asia, the Kyoto Protocol signed in 1997 at the Third Conference of Parties for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, and the deceleration in growth of agricultural productivity in Asia. Exploration of these issues provides important lessons on how to sustain economic growth based on technology borrowing.