With contributions from 35 leading economists, this forward-looking book explores the future of development economics against the background of the past half-century of development thought and practice. Outstanding representatives of the past two generations of development economists assess development thinking at the turn of the century and look to the unsettled questions confronting the next generation.The volume offers a thorough analysis of the broad range of issues involved in development economics, and it is especially timely in its critique of what is needed in development theory and policy to reduce poverty. An overriding issue is whether in the future 'development economics' is to be regarded simply as applied economics or whether the nature and scope of development economics will constitute a need for a special development theory to supplement general economic theory.'Frontiers of Development Economics' is an ideal reference for all those working in the international development community.

Written to provide students with the critical tools used in today’s development economics research and practice, Essentials of Development Economics represents an alternative approach to traditional textbooks on the subject. Compact and less expensive than other textbooks for undergraduate development economics courses, Essentials of Development Economics offers a broad overview of key topics and methods in the field. Its fourteen easy-to-read chapters introduce cutting-edge research and present best practices and state-of-the-art methods. Each chapter concludes with an embedded QR code that connects readers to ancillary audiovisual materials and supplemental readings on a website curated by the authors. By mastering the material in this book, students will have the conceptual grounding needed to move on to higher-level development economics courses.

This title represents the most forward thinking and comprehensive review of development economics currently available.

Economic Theory, academic policy analysis and public policy design are becoming more interdependent. Hence, the demands for close interactions between the policy community and the research community have been rising significantly. This book assesses how recent economic thinking has advanced under these influences. Furthermore, it evaluates the important contribution economics can add to the design and evaluation of public policy, now more than ever before. The study is of interest to policy makers, policy analysts, researchers and students of economics at all levels. The authors, which include many of Germany's most eminent economists, draw on their wide experience in research and consultancy to present a coherent view of where European economic theory stands today and how it can play a role in the management of the economy of the new millennium.

Frontiers of Development in the Amazon: Riches, Risks, and Resistances contributes to ongoing debates on the processes of change in the Amazon, a region inherently tied to the expansion of internal and external socio-economic and environmental frontiers. This book offers interdisciplinary analyses from a range of scholars in Europe, Latin America, and the United States that question the methods of development and the range of socio-ecological impacts of those methods by examining the theoretical, methodological, and empirical dimensions of frontier-making along with evaluating and refining existing frameworks. Contributors focus on the complex politics of border formation shaped by institutional, economic, and political forces, placing them in relation to ethical, imaginary, and symbolic elements. In doing so, contributors explore the dynamic production of identities, values, and subjectivities, covering matters of migratory patterns, complex power struggles, and intensive—at times violent—clashes. Among other topics, this book assesses the recent encroachment of export-driven agribusiness into the Amazon Region in the context of recolonization, resource exploitation and multiple programs of modernization and national integration. Scholars of Latin American studies, international development, environmental studies, and applied social sciences will find this book particularly useful.

A crucial challenge for economists is figuring out how people interpret the world and form expectations that will likely influence their economic activity. Inflation, asset prices, exchange rates, investment, and consumption are just some of the economic variables that are largely explained by expectations. Here George Evans and Seppo Honkapohja bring new explanatory power to a variety of expectation formation models by focusing on the learning factor. Whereas the rational expectations paradigm offers the prevailing method to determining expectations, it assumes very theoretical knowledge on the part of economic actors. Evans and Honkapohja contribute to a growing body of research positing that households and firms learn by making forecasts using observed data, updating their forecast rules over time in response to errors. This book is the first systematic development of the new statistical learning approach. Depending on the particular economic structure, the economy may converge to a standard rational-expectations or a "rational bubble" solution, or exhibit persistent learning dynamics. The learning approach also provides tools to assess the importance of new models with expectational indeterminacy, in which expectations are an independent cause of macroeconomic fluctuations. Moreover, learning dynamics provide a theory for the evolution of expectations and selection between alternative equilibria, with implications for business cycles, asset price volatility, and policy. This book provides an authoritative treatment of this emerging field, developing the analytical techniques in detail and using them to synthesize and extend existing research.

This book explores peripheral visions on economic development, both in the sense that it deals with specific issues of economic development and underdevelopment in countries at the periphery of the world economy, and in terms of its exploration of the economic thinking developed in those regions, particularly in Latin America. Bringing together an international group of historians of thought, economic historians and development economists from Latin America, Europe and other parts of the world, this volume is highly credited and is an excellent contribution to development economic studies. This book is divided into four parts. Following the introduction, the first set of papers describes the evolution of core-periphery perspectives in key contributions by Raúl Prebisch, Oskar Lange, Albert Hirschman, Celso Furtado and Homero Cuevas. The second set discusses the links between unbalanced productive structures and external trade in peripheral countries. The third set contains papers on critical episodes in the development of monetary and financial systems in Latin America during the 19th and 20th centuries. The fourth set deals with geographical and institutional aspects of path dependence in the governance of external trade and in the development of liberties, property rights and economic education in Europe, Latin America and Africa. Several chapters make use of hitherto unexplored archival material. Other chapters draw attention to important episodes or literatures that have largely gone unnoticed in the English-speaking world. Yet others combine conceptual innovations with work on new historical data and other sources hitherto not utilized in such contexts. This book is ideal for those who study and research development economics, history of economic thought and economic history, especially in Latin America.

Throughout much of history, a critical driving force behind global economic development has been the response of society to the scarcity of key natural resources. Increasing scarcity raises the cost of exploiting existing natural resources and creates incentives in all economies to innovate and conserve more of these resources. However, economies have also responded to increasing scarcity by obtaining and developing more of these resources. Since the agricultural transition over 12,000 years ago, this exploitation of new 'frontiers' has often proved to be a pivotal human response to natural resource scarcity. This book provides a fascinating account of the contribution that natural resource exploitation has made to economic development in key eras of world history. This not only fills an important gap in the literature on economic history but also shows how we can draw lessons from these past epochs for attaining sustainable economic development in the world today.

Transcending the arid formalism of present-day economic theory, Frontiers of Political Economy develops a new and accessible perspective on the world economy. Guglielmo Carchedi identifies and analyses three key features of modern capitalism: the rapidly increasing share of human labour needed for the advancement of science and technology rather than for the production of goods; the global, rather than national, nature of production, distribution and consumption; and the dominance of the oligopolies. This analysis enables Carchedi to explore new theoretical frontiers: from an original theory of mental and material labour to an investigation of the conditions under which mental labour produces value; from an assessment of the class structure of modern capitalism to an appraisal of the social content of science and technology; from an alternative account of crises, inflation and stagflation to a study of their relation to the destruction of value and to arms production. He also cast fresh light on a number of basic contemporary issues—including the present financial and monetary crisis—and surveys the most important recent controversies in language accessible to non-specialists. Rigorous and wide-ranging, but written with great lucidity, Frontiers of Political Economy is an essential book for both specialists and students in economics and politics.

Democratic Economic Planning presents a concrete proposal for how to organize, carry out, and integrate comprehensive annual economic planning, investment planning, and long-run development planning so as to maximize popular participation, distribute the burdens and benefits of economic activity fairly, achieve environmental sustainability, and use scarce productive resources efficiently. The participatory planning procedures proposed provide workers in self-managed councils and consumers in neighbourhood councils with autonomy over their own activities while ensuring that they use scarce productive resources in socially responsible ways without subjecting them to competitive market forces. Certain mathematical and economic skills are required to fully understand and evaluate the planning procedures discussed and evaluated in technical sections in a number of chapters. These sections are necessary to advance the theory of democratic planning, and should be of primary interest to readers who have those skills. However, the book is written so that the main argument can be followed without fully digesting the more technical sections. Democratic Economic Planning is written for dreamers who are disenamored with the economics of competition and greed want to know how a system of equitable cooperation can be organized; and also for sceptics who demand "hard proof" that an economy without markets and private enterprise is possible.