How did the rich countries really become rich? In this provocative study, Ha-Joon Chang examines the great pressure on developing countries from the developed world to adopt certain 'good policies' and 'good institutions', seen today as necessary for economic development. His conclusions are compelling and disturbing: that developed countries are attempting to 'kick away the ladder' with which they have climbed to the top, thereby preventing developing countries from adopting policies and institutions that they themselves have used.
This volume honours the contributions Claudia Goldin has made to scholarship and teaching in economic history and labour economics. The chapters address some closely integrated issues: the role of human capital in the long-term development of the American economy, trends in fertility and marriage, and women's participation in economic change.
Hofman, a researcher with the Chile-based Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, uses growth accounting methods and previously unavailable long-term series data to assess the economic performance of the region during the century from a comparative and historical perspective. In particular he compares Latin American economies to those of advanced capitalist economies, to newly industrialized economies, and to Spain and Portugal because of the historical ties. He looks at the reasons for the poor or negative growth during the 1980s and the apparent recovery in the 1990s and at such problems as debt, income inequality, high inflation, cyclical instability, and political and policy instability. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
In recent years, scholars in a number of disciplines have focused their attention on understanding the early American economy. This text enters the resurgent discussion by showcasing the work of leading scholars who represent a spectrum of historiographical and methodological viewpoints.
"The challenges facing agriculture are plenty. Along with the world's growing population and diminishing amounts of water and arable land, the gradual increase in severe weather presents new challenges and imperatives for producing new, more resilient crops to feed a more crowded planet in the twenty-first century. Innovation has historically helped agriculture keep pace with earth's social, population, and ecological changes. In the last 50 years, mechanical, biological, and chemical innovations have more than doubled agricultural output while barely changing input quantities. The ample investment behind these innovations was available because of a high rate of return: a 2007 paper found that the median ROI in agriculture was 45 percent between 1965 and 2005. This landscape has changed. Today many of the world's wealthier countries have scaled back their share of GDP devoted to agricultural R&D amid evidence of diminishing returns. Universities, which have historically been a major source of agricultural innovation, increasingly depend on funding from industry rather than government to fund their research. As Upton Sinclair wrote of the effects industry influences, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." In this volume of the NBER Conference Report series, editor Petra Moser offers an empirical, applied-economic framework to the different elements of agricultural R&D, particularly as they relate to the shift from public to private funding. Individual chapters examine the sources of agricultural knowledge and investigate challenges for measuring the returns to the adoption of new agricultural technologies, examine knowledge spillovers from universities to agricultural innovation, and explore interactions between university engagement and scientific productivity. Additional analysis of agricultural venture capital point to it as an emerging and future source of resource in this essential domain"--
This edited collection examines the evolution of regional inequality in Latin America in the long run. The authors support the hypothesis that the current regional disparities are principally the result of a long and complex process in which historical, geographical, economic, institutional, and political factors have all worked together. Lessons from the past can aid current debates on regional inequalities, territorial cohesion, and public policies in developing and also developed countries. In contrast with European countries, Latin American economies largely specialized in commodity exports, showed high levels of urbanization and high transports costs (both domestic and international). This new research provides a new perspective on the economic history of Latin American regions and offers new insights on how such forces interact in peripheral countries. In that sense, natural resources, differences in climatic conditions, industrial backwardness and low population density areas leads us to a new set of questions and tentative answers. This book brings together a group of leading American and European economic historians in order to build a new set of data on historical regional GDPs for nine Latin American countries: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela. This transnational perspective on Latin American economic development process is of interest to researchers, students and policy makers.
Why has Africa remained persistently poor over its recorded history? Has Africa always been poor? What has been the nature of Africa's poverty and how do we explain its origins? This volume takes a necessary interdisciplinary approach to these questions by bringing together perspectives from archaeology, linguistics, history, anthropology, political science, and economics. Several contributors note that Africa's development was at par with many areas of Europe in the first millennium of the Common Era. Why Africa fell behind is a key theme in this volume, with insights that should inform Africa's developmental strategies.
Through an analysis of slavery as an economic institution, Gavin Wright presents an innovative look at the economic divergence between North and South in the antebellum era. He draws a distinction between slavery as a form of work organization—the aspect that has dominated historical debates—and slavery as a set of property rights. Slave-based commerce remained central to the eighteenth-century rise of the Atlantic economy, not because slave plantations were superior as a method of organizing production, but because slaves could be put to work on sugar plantations that could not have attracted free labor on economically viable terms.
