DEVELOPMENT ECONOMICS PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICES

The purpose of this book is to introduce students to the exciting and challenging subject of development economics, which draws on several branches of economics in order to elucidate and understand the development difficulties facing the economies of the world’s poor countries. This does not mean that the book provides a recipe or blueprint for development; far from it. There can be no general recipes of this nature, and even if there were, there would have to be more than economic ingredients. The book combines description and analysis, with an emphasis on the elaboration of simple and useful theoretical economic models for an understanding of the issues that comprise the subject matter of development economics. The desire for material improvement in developing countries is strong, and economics does have something positive to offer by way of analysis unadulterated by political, sociological and other non-economic variables. In the final analysis, growth and development must be considered an economic process in the important practical sense that it is unlikely to proceed very far in the absence of an increase in the quantity and quality of the resources available for production.