The study of economic development is one of the newest, most exciting, and most challenging branches of the broader disciplines of economics and political economy. Although one could claim that Adam Smith was the first "development economist" and that his Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, was the first treatise on economic development, the systematic study of the problems and processes of economic development in Africa, Asia, and Latin America has emerged only over the past five decades. Yet there are some people who would still claim that development economics is not really a distinct branch of economics in the same sense as, say, macroeconomics, labor economics, public finance, or monetary economics. Rather, they would assert, it is simply an amalgamation and basically an unaltered application of all these traditional fields, but with a specific focus on the individual economies of Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
We disagree with this viewpoint. Although development economics often draws on relevant principles and concepts from other branches of economics in either a standard or modified form, for the most part it is a field of study that is rapidly evolving its own distinctive analytic and methodological identity. Development economics is not the same as the economics of advanced capitalist nations (modern "neoclassical" economics). Nor is it similar to the economics of the formerly centralized socialist societies ("Marxist" or "command" economics). It is nothing more or less than the economics of contemporary poor, underdeveloped nations with varying ideological orientations, diverse cultural backgrounds, and very complex yet similar economic problems that usually demand new ideas and novel approaches. Recent developments in theories of poverty traps, and the role of institutions, confirm this. The awarding of the 1979 Nobel Prize in economics to two eminent development economists, W. Arthur Lewis of Princeton University and Theodore Schultz of the University of Chicago, for their pioneering studies of the development process, provided dramatic confirmation of the status of economic development as a separate field within the economics discipline. Other Nobel laureates have also made major contributions to development economics, notably Amartya Sen, who won the prize in 1998, and Joseph Stiglitz, who won it in 2001. We begin, therefore, by contrasting modern development economics with "traditional" neoclassical economics. We then devote the bulk of this initial chapter to an analysis of the meaning of development. In Chapter 2 we look at the diverse structure and common characteristics of developing countries.
0 Comments