This volume of essays contains 16 papers the author has written over the last 40 years on various aspects of the life and work of John Maynard Keynes and Nicholas Kaldor. It covers both theoretical and applied topics and highlight the continued relevance of Keynesian and Kaldorian ideas for understanding the functioning of capitalist economies.
This important volume brings together 17 major essays written over the last 25 years in the field of growth and development. Many of the papers make pioneering contributions, while others are more reflective and eclectic.
In response to the damage caused by a growth-led global economy, researchers across the world started investigating the association between environmental pollution and its possible determinants using different models and techniques. Most famously, the environmental Kuznets curve hypothesizes an inverted U-shaped association between environmental quality and gross domestic product (GDP). This book explores the latest literature on the environmental Kuznets curve, including developments in the methodology, the impacts of the pandemic, and other recent findings. Researchers have recently broadened the range of the list of drivers of environmental pollution under consideration, which now includes variables such as foreign direct investment, trade expansion, financial development, human activities, population growth, and renewable and nonrenewable energy resources, all of which vary across different countries and times. And in addition to CO2 emissions, other proxies for environmental quality – such as water, land, and ecological footprints – have been used in recent studies. This book also incorporates analysis of the relationship between economic growth and the environment during the COVID-19 crisis, presenting new empirical work on the impact of the pandemic on energy use, the financial sector, trade, and tourism. Collectively, these developments have improved the direction and extent of the environmental Kuznets curve hypothesis and broadened the basket of dependent and independent variables which may be incorporated. This book will be invaluable reading for researchers in environmental economics and econometrics.
This revised edition includes new material on foreign assistance and debt and has updated statistics and the institutional material. The book aims to provide students with an understanding of the theory and practice of economic development.
"Calculations of marginal welfare effects suggest that agricultural development has had important positive effects on national welfare, especially in developing countries. Latin American and Caribbean countries have also benefited from agricultural growth, but nonagricultural production has had marginal welfare effects that are greater in magnitude than those provided by agricultural activities. In contrast, the industrialized, high-income countries experienced marginal welfare gains from nonagricultural activities that are much greater than those derived from agriculture, whose impact is actually negative. These calculations of marginal welfare effects across regions depend on econometric estimates of elasticities linking agricultural and nonagricultural economic activities to four elements in a national welfare function: national GDP per capita, average income of the poorest households within countries, environmental outcomes concerning air and water pollution and deforestation, and macroeconomic volatility. The econometric analyses are motivated by theoretical treatments of key issues. The empirical models are estimated with various econometric techniques that deal with issues of causality and international heterogeneity. This paper--a product of the Office of the Chief Economist, Latin America and the Caribbean Region--is part of a larger effort in the region to study the rural contribution to development"--World Bank web site.
The book highlights proceedings from the Berlin 2008: Agriculture and Development conference held in preparation for the World Development Report 2008.
Economic and social progress requires a diverse ecosystem of firms that play complementary roles. Making It Big: Why Developing Countries Need More Large Firms constitutes one of the most up-to-date assessments of how large firms are created in low- and middle-income countries and their role in development. It argues that large firms advance a range of development objectives in ways that other firms do not: large firms are more likely to innovate, export, and offer training and are more likely to adopt international standards of quality, among other contributions. Their particularities are closely associated with productivity advantages and translate into improved outcomes not only for their owners but also for their workers and for smaller enterprises in their value chains. The challenge for economic development, however, is that production does not reach economic scale in low- and middle-income countries. Why are large firms scarcer in developing countries? Drawing on a rare set of data from public and private sources, as well as proprietary data from the International Finance Corporation and case studies, this book shows that large firms are often born large—or with the attributes of largeness. In other words, what is distinct about them is often in place from day one of their operations. To fill the “missing top†? of the firm-size distribution with additional large firms, governments should support the creation of such firms by opening markets to greater competition. In low-income countries, this objective can be achieved through simple policy reorientation, such as breaking oligopolies, removing unnecessary restrictions to international trade and investment, and establishing strong rules to prevent the abuse of market power. Governments should also strive to ensure that private actors have the skills, technology, intelligence, infrastructure, and finance they need to create large ventures. Additionally, they should actively work to spread the benefits from production at scale across the largest possible number of market participants. This book seeks to bring frontier thinking and evidence on the role and origins of large firms to a wide range of readers, including academics, development practitioners and policy makers.
Agriculture and climate changes are closely linked. Agriculture has a significant impact on the process of climate change. There is uncertainty surrounding the implications of climate change for agricultural production. This document consists of two studies on this relationship. The first study provides an analysis of the various methodologies that have been used to measure the potential impacts of climate change on agricultural production and makes suggestions for further research. The second study is on the impact of agriculture on climate. It gives a detailed analysis of the potential for implementing the Clean Development Mechanism proposed under the Kyoto Protocol Convention on Climate Change in the agricultural sector of developing countries along with the relevant policy implications and requirements
