Development Economics (From Poverty to Prosperity)

Author: (Japanese) Yujiro Matsuhashi, translated by Li Zhou
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2003-02-01
Features: This book is a comprehensive and logically rigorous monograph on development economics, organized in the order of interest to professionals. It can also serve as a textbook for graduate students and advanced undergraduate students. The book poses a major question: Why have only a few countries in the world achieved high levels of wealth, and why are only a handful of developing countries approaching this level, while most countries remain stuck in poverty and stagnation? A clear factor contributing to the global disparity is the differing abilities to develop and adopt advanced technology. So, why is the number of developing countries that have entered the track of narrowing the productivity gap with developed countries so limited? A possible answer is that low-income countries, constrained by their social and cultural factors, struggle to adapt appropriate institutions to imported advanced technology. To find ways to eliminate these constraints, the book explores the nature of these intertwined constraints through comparative case studies of countries that have successfully overcome them. The book outlines the quantitative characteristics of third-world development in terms of population growth, depletion of natural resources, capital accumulation, and technological change. However, the primary method used in this book is comparative institutional analysis, which compares the types of institutional evolution caused by resource endowments and technological change under different regional, temporal, and socio-cultural contexts. The basis for this comparison is my experience and knowledge of East Asian, particularly Japanese, economic development. It must be acknowledged that, like Adam Smith based his insights on observations of 18th-century Britain and Friedrich List on observations of 19th-century Germany, my perspective is also biased. Without hesitation, my goal is to build a new "Wealth of Nations" framework, although the current achievements are merely a small step in the journey toward that objective.