Category: Book Review

What Can We Learn from Alternative Theories of Economic Development?

Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven7 Comments

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As people across the world are struggling to understand the rise of Trumpism, anti-establishment and anti-free trade movements, (Tallinn University of Technology), (Jawaharlal Nehru University) and (Tallinn University of Technology) have put together an impressive that can help make sense of what’s going on. As the field of Economics has become increasingly narrow since the 1970s, many important scholars and theories have been excluded from the field, and since forgotten. This Handbook presents rich historical accounts and ideas that can help explain economic and social development, and is a much needed attempt to correct for the existing biases in the field of Economics.Read More »

Africa: Why Western Economists Get It Wrong

grievechelwa2 Comments

2-3-_unpacking_african_numbers_10070552376Morten Jerven, image via Wikimedia

Development economics as a field of study was formally launched in the 1950s by the Afro-Caribbean economist who, out of necessity, wanted to understand how his own country, Saint Lucia, could transform from an agro-based economy into a modern industrial state (later, in 1979, Lewis was awarded the for this work, the only black person to have won the prize to date). For Lewis, the key to providing a satisfactory answer to the problem of underdevelopment lay in studying those societies as they were and not in comparing them to some mythical ideal. Saint Lucia, like all developing countries, had a lot of underemployed labor in its agricultural sector. The question was how best to marshal this valuable resource into driving industrialization.

Sadly, development economics has moved away from Lewis鈥� pioneering contribution of studying poor countries on their own terms. For example, today鈥檚 development economists explain Tanzania鈥檚 lack of development as stemming from its inability to be more like Sweden. This way of studying development, termed the 鈥渟ubtraction approach鈥�, has led us down a dark alleyway where there is more confusion than elucidation. That, at least, is the charge leveled by economic historian in his book published in 2015, but still circulating and prompting debate in academia and amongst practitioners.

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