Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not provides a striking new answer to the classic question of why Europe industrialised from the late eighteenth century and Asia did not. Drawing significantly from ...the case of India, Prasannan Parthasarathi shows that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the advanced regions of Europe and Asia were more alike than different, both characterized by sophisticated and growing economies. Their subsequent divergence can be attributed to different competitive and ecological pressures that in turn produced varied state policies and economic outcomes. This account breaks with conventional views, which hold that divergence occurred because Europe possessed superior markets, rationality, science or institutions. It offers instead a groundbreaking rereading of global economic development that ranges from India, Japan and China to Britain, France and the Ottoman Empire and from the textile and coal industries to the roles of science, technology and the state.
What's wrong with foreign aid? Many policymakers, aid practitioners, and scholars have called into question its ability to increase economic growth, alleviate poverty, or promote social development. ...At the macro level, only tenuous links between development aid and improved living conditions have been found. At the micro level, only a few programs outlast donor support and even fewer appear to achieve lasting improvements. The authors of this book argue that much of aid's failure is related to the institutions that structure its delivery. These institutions govern the complex relationships between the main actors in the aid delivery system and often generate a series of perverse incentives that promote inefficient and unsustainable outcomes. In their analysis, the authors apply the theoretical insights of the new institutional economics to several settings. First, they investigate the institutions of Sida, the Swedish aid agency, to analyze how that aid agency's institutions can produce incentives inimical to desired outcomes, contrary to the desires of its own staff. Second, the authors use cases from India, a country with low aid dependence, and Zambia, a country with high aid dependence, to explore how institutions on the ground in recipient countries also mediate the effectiveness of aid. Throughout the book, the authors offer suggestions about how to improve aid's effectiveness. These suggestions include how to structure evaluations in order to improve outcomes, how to employ agency staff to gain from their on-the-ground experience, and how to engage stakeholders as "owners" in the design, resource mobilization, learning, and evaluation processes of development assistance programs. Available in OSO: http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/content/economicsfinance/0199278849/toc.html Contributors to this volume - Krister Andersson, Center for the Study of Institutions, Population and Environmental Change, Indiana University Matthew R. Auer, Associate Professor of Public and Environmental Affairs, Indiana University Roy Gardner, Professor of Economics, Indiana University Clark C. Gibson, Associate Professor of Political Science, University of California Elinor Ostrom, Professor of Government, Indiana University Sujai Shivakumar, National Research Council, Washington D.C. Christopher J. Waller, Chair of Economics, University of Notre Dame
The knowledge capital of nations Hanushek, Eric Alan; Woessmann, Ludger
2015, 20150424, 20150410, 2015-05-26, 2015-04-24
eBook, Book
In this book the authors make a simple, central claim, developed with rigorous theoretical and empirical support: knowledge is the key to a country's development. Of course, every country ...acknowledges the importance of developing human capital, but the authors argue that message has become distorted, with politicians and researchers concentrating not on valued skills but on proxies for them. The common focus is on school attainment, although time in school provides a very misleading picture of how skills enter into development. The authors contend that the cognitive skills of the population-which they term the "knowledge capital" of a nation-are essential to long-run prosperity. The authors subject their hypotheses about the relationship between cognitive skills (as consistently measured by international student assessments) and economic growth to a series of tests, including alternate specifications, different subsets of countries, and econometric analysis of causal interpretations. They find that their main results are remarkably robust, and equally applicable to developing and developed countries. They demonstrate, for example, that the "Latin American growth puzzle" and the "East Asian miracle" can be explained by these regions' knowledge capital. Turning to the policy implications of their argument, they call for an education system that develops effective accountability, promotes choice and competition, and provides direct rewards for good performance. (Orig.).
Ideas and concepts have been a driving force in human progress, and they
may be the most important legacy of the United Nations. UN ideas have set past,
present, and future international agendas in ...many global economic and social arenas
and have also led to initiatives and actions that have improved the quality of human
life. This capstone volume draws upon findings of the other 14 books in the
acclaimed United Nations Intellectual History Project Series. The authors not only
assess the development and implementation of UN ideas regarding sustainable economic
development and human security, but also apply lessons learned to suggest ways in
which the United Nations can play a fuller role in confronting the challenges of
human survival with dignity in the 21st century.
In modern society, economic growth is considered to be the primary goal pursued through policymaking. But when and how did this perception become widely adopted among social scientists, politicians ...and the general public? Focusing on the OECD, one of the least understood international organisations, Schmelzer offers the first transnational study to chart the history of growth discourses. He reveals how the pursuit of GDP growth emerged as a societal goal and the ways in which the methods employed to measure, model and prescribe growth resulted in statistical standards, international policy frameworks and widely accepted norms. Setting his analysis within the context of capitalist development, post-war reconstruction, the Cold War, decolonization, and industrial crisis, The Hegemony of Growth sheds new light on the continuous reshaping of the growth paradigm up to the neoliberal age and adds historical depth to current debates on climate change, inequality and the limits to growth.
This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on bloomsburycollections.com. How much would poor nations need to invest to eliminate poverty, get ...all children in school and provide adequate basic health care for all? Can they afford it? Financing Human Development in Africa, Asia and the Middle East provides some clear answers to these questions. The contributors assess feasible financing strategies underpinning actions to enhance human development in pursuance of the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The contributors analyse these strategies in the context of broader concerns of economic development in nine countries in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. The assessments stress the importance of redesigning macroeconomic policies so as to make these more supportive of long-term economic growth and employment creation, while ensuring sufficient investments in human development in order to end poverty and overcome deep-rooted inequalities.
In order to promote economic activity, a country needs a productive and sound financial structure and financial development as a backbone of the economic development of the country. Our study thus ...aims to investigate the “resource curse” hypothesis in the presence of globalization, human capital, and economic growth in China during the period 1971–2017. Within a multivariate framework, we provide more rigorous analysis through several econometric methods, for instance, the Bayer and Hanck cointegration, the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL), robustness check by fully modified ordinary least squares (FMOLS), dynamic ordinary least squares (DOLS), canonical cointegrating regression (CCR), and Breitung-Candelon spectral Granger causality testing. Our findings show that the effect of natural resources on financial development is negative and confirm China's resources curse hypothesis, while globalization, human capital, and economic development lead to improving the financial development of the country. The causality analysis reveals that natural resources, human capital, and economic growth have a long-term relationship with financial development, while globalization short and medium-term linked with financial development. In order to promote financial sector development, our empirical outcomes have significant policy implications that highlight the need to encourage globalization and the development of human capital to ensure the effective management of natural resources.
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•We explore the “resource curse” hypothesis in the presence of globalization, human capital, and economic growth in China.•The Bayer and Hanck cointegration, the ARDL bounds cointegration, and robust econometrics techniques are employed.•In the long-run, natural resources, human capital, and economic growth are important predictors for financial development.•Globalization contributes to financial development in the medium-term and short-term.
