Why is catch-up rare and why have some nations succeeded while others failed? This volumes examines how nations learn by reviewing key structural and contingent factors that contribute to dynamic learning and catch-up.
“A superb new understanding of the dynamic economy as a learning society, one that goes well beyond the usual treatment of education, training, and R&D.”—Robert Kuttner, author of The Stakes: 2020 and the Survival of American Democracy Since its publication Creating a Learning Society has served as an effective tool for those who advocate government policies to advance science and technology. It shows persuasively how enormous increases in our standard of living have been the result of learning how to learn, and it explains how advanced and developing countries alike can model a new learning economy on this example. Creating a Learning Society: Reader’s Edition uses accessible language to focus on the work’s central message and policy prescriptions. As the book makes clear, creating a learning society requires good governmental policy in trade, industry, intellectual property, and other important areas. The text’s central thesis—that every policy affects learning—is critical for governments unaware of the innovative ways they can propel their economies forward. “Profound and dazzling. In their new book, Joseph E. Stiglitz and Bruce C. Greenwald study the human wish to learn and our ability to learn and so uncover the processes that relate the institutions we devise and the accompanying processes that drive the production, dissemination, and use of knowledge . . . This is social science at its best.”—Partha Dasgupta, University of Cambridge “An impressive tour de force, from the theory of the firm all the way to long-term development, guided by the focus on knowledge and learning . . . This is an ambitious book with far-reaching policy implications.”—Giovanni Dosi, director, Institute of Economics, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna “[A] sweeping work of macroeconomic theory.”—Harvard Business Review
NEW YORK TIMES AND WALL STREET JOURNAL BESTSELLER • From two winners of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, “who have demonstrated the importance of societal institutions for a country’s prosperity” “A wildly ambitious work that hopscotches through history and around the world to answer the very big question of why some countries get rich and others don’t.”—The New York Times FINALIST: Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, Financial Times, The Economist, BusinessWeek, Bloomberg, The Christian Science Monitor, The Plain Dealer Why are some nations rich and others poor, divided by wealth and poverty, health and sickness, food and famine? Is it culture, the weather, or geography that determines prosperity or poverty? As Why Nations Fail shows, none of these factors is either definitive or destiny. Drawing on fifteen years of original research, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson conclusively show that it is our man-made political and economic institutions that underlie economic success (or the lack of it). Korea, to take just one example, is a remarkably homogenous nation, yet the people of North Korea are among the poorest on earth while their brothers and sisters in South Korea are among the richest. The differences between the Koreas is due to the politics that created those two different institutional trajectories. Acemoglu and Robinson marshal extraordinary historical evidence from the Roman Empire, the Mayan city-states, the Soviet Union, the United States, and Africa to build a new theory of political economy with great relevance for the big questions of today, among them: • Will China’s economy continue to grow at such a high speed and ultimately overwhelm the West? • Are America’s best days behind it? Are we creating a vicious cycle that enriches and empowers a small minority? “This book will change the way people think about the wealth and poverty of nations . . . as ambitious as Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel.”—BusinessWeek
A rigorous, pathbreaking analysis demonstrating that a country's prosperity is directly related in the long run to the skills of its population. In this book Eric Hanushek and Ludger Woessmann 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 Hanushek and Woessmann 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. Hanushek and Woessmann contend that the cognitive skills of the population—which they term the “knowledge capital” of a nation—are essential to long-run prosperity. Hanushek and Woessmann 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.
This book describes how different nations have defined the core competencies and skills that young people will need in order to thrive in the twenty-first-century, and how those nations have fashioned educational policies and curricula meant to promote those skills. The book examines six countries—Chile, China, India, Mexico, Singapore, and the United States—exploring how each one defines, supports, and cultivates those competencies that students will need in order to succeed in the current century. Teaching and Learning for the Twenty-First Century appears at a time of heightened attention to comparative studies of national education systems, and to international student assessments such as those that have come out of PISA (the Program for International Student Assessment), led by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. This book’s crucial contribution to the burgeoning field of international education arises out of its special attention to first principles—and thus to first questions: As Reimers and Chung explain, “much can be gained by an explicit investigation of the intended purposes of education, in what they attempt to teach students, and in the related questions of why those purposes and how they are achieved.” These questions are crucial to education practice and reform at a time when educators (and the students they serve) face unique, pressing challenges. The book’s detailed attention to such questions signals its indispensable value for policy makers, scholars, and education leaders today.
Usually, a country brand is not focused, resulting in unsuccessful place branding. It is possible to successfully raise your national identity to the level of an attractive brand. Building a country brand is an investment, with strong positive returns. This book will guide you along the path to building a successful brand.
Thirty years ago, China seemed hopelessly mired in poverty, Mexico triggered the Third World Debt Crisis, and Brazil suffered under hyperinflation. Since then, these and other developing countries have turned themselves around, while First World nations, battered by crises, depend more than ever on sustained growth in emerging markets. In Turnaround, economist Peter Blair Henry argues that the secret to emerging countries' success (and ours) is discipline -- sustained commitment to a pragmatic growth strategy. With the global economy teetering on the brink, the stakes are higher than ever. And because stakes are so high for all nations, we need less polarization and more focus on facts to answer the fundamental question: which policy reforms, implemented under what circumstances, actually increase economic efficiency? Pushing past the tired debates, Henry shows that the stock market's forecasts of policy impact provide an important complement to traditional measures. Through examples ranging from the drastic income disparity between Barbados and his native Jamaica to the "catch up" economics of China and the taming of inflation in Latin America, Henry shows that in much of the emerging world the policy pendulum now swings toward prudence and self-control. With similar discipline and a dash of humility, he concludes, the First World may yet recover and create long-term prosperity for all its citizens. Bold, rational, and forward-looking, Turnaround offers vital lessons for developed and developing nations in search of stability and growth.
SDG4 - Quality Education: Inclusivity, Equity and Lifelong Learning For All will explore the multifaceted and complex nature of the concepts of inclusivity and quality education.
Industrialization supported by industrial hubs has been widely associated with structural transformation and catch-up. But while the direct economic benefits of industrial hubs are significant, their value lies first and foremost in their contribution as incubators of industrialization, production and technological capability, and innovation. The Oxford Handbook of Industrial Hubs and Economic Development adopts an interdisciplinary approach to examine the conceptual underpinnings, review empirical evidence of regions and economies, and extract pertinent lessons for policy reasearchers and practitioners on the key drivers of success and failure for industrial hubs. This Handbook illustrates the diverse and complex nature of industrial hubs and shows how they promote industrialization, economic structural transformation, and technological catch-up. It explores the implications of emerging issues and trends such as environmental protection and sustainability, technological advancement, shifts in the global economy, and urbanization.