Author Description

Development Economics addresses one major question: Why has a small set of countries achieved a high level of affluence while the majority remain poor and stagnant? Why, in turn, has the number of developing economies set on the track of closing their productivity gap with advanced economies been so limited? One obvious factor underlying this global divergence is unevenness in the ability to adopt and develop advanced technology, due in large measure to the difficulty experienced by low-income economies in preparing appropriate institutions for borrowing advanced technology given their social and cultural constraints. The major task of this volume is to explore the nature of these binding constraints, with the aim of identifying the means to remove them. Comparisons are made with countries where the constraints have been successfully lifted - most notably Japan and East Asian NIEs.