This book analyses the impact of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) on economic development. It contains theoretical and empirical studies, including panel studies on various issues facing developing countries, such as education, corruption, economic growth, government expenditure, financial inclusion, foreign direct investment, infrastructure, economic and social welfare, and inequality. Each chapter offers a well-conceived analysis of the most recent trends in both theory and empirics and addresses numerous policy implications related to the different aspects dealt with in the volume. Overall, this book will be an excellent guide for global graduate students at the Master and PhD levels, as well as academics researching various issues related to economic development while analyzing the role of ICTs. It also addresses numerous policy implications related to economic development for policymakers, investors and stakeholders.

Korea's experience of rapid economic growth represents both hope and a challenge to many developing countries. The conventional wisdom inside and outside Korea has been that the government's policies such as export promotion, industrial targeting, and so on, made the rapid growth possible. This book investigates the effects of the policies and concludes that Korea's growth experience does not corroborate the view. Rather, it points to the tremendous growth in size of the world market as an important factor that has been overlooked in the discussion of nations' economic growth in the post-World War II era. It was roughly 100 times bigger in the early 1960s than it was in the middle of the First Industrial Revolution. The potential "gains from trade" were that much greater; while the Korean economy had not been realizing the potential gains, it began to as soon as a major reform of the foreign exchange system in 1961 removed the impediments to foreign trade. Explosive export expansion and rapid growth of the economy immediately followed. The "Korean Miracle" may be better understood as a process whereby the economy realized its huge potential.

Hiring domestic workers is a routine part of the expat development lifestyle. Whether working for the United Nations, governmental aid agencies, or NGOs such as Oxfam, Save the Children, or World Vision, expatriate aid workers in the developing world employ maids, nannies, security guards, gardeners and chauffeurs. Though nearly every expat aid worker in the developing world has local people working within the intimate sphere of their homes, these relationships are seldom, if ever, discussed in analyses of the development paradigm and its praxis. Aid and the Help addresses this major lacuna through an ethnographic analysis of the intersection of development work and domestic work. Examining the reproductive labor cheaply purchased by aid workers posted overseas opens the opportunity to assess the multiple ways that the ostensibly "giving" industry of development can be an extractive industry as well.

Since the mid 1990s, theoretical and empirical research on how social capital affects well-being has blossomed in the field of economic development. Based on noted theoretical and empirical work in other social sciences, this concept is now becoming a vital new tool for economists. The chapters in this volume explore the challenges and opportunities raised by this concept for researchers, practitioners and teachers. Social Capital and Economic Development is based upon a consistent, policy-based vision of how social capital affects well-being in developing countries. The book includes a comparison of experimental and empirical evidence on social capital and a range of field-based evidence, from environmental to cultural to nation-building and on how investment in social capital can improve well-being. The contributions are from leading development economists as well as non-economic social scientists with expertise in this field. Development academics, practitioners, and environmental economists will find this coherent volume of great interest, as well as those involved in public policy in the developing world.

This book explains the macro-drivers of growth behind the economic development of Bangladesh. Few countries in the developing world have shown as exciting a promise of economic prosperity as Bangladesh. The promising nature of the Bangladeshi economy raises interesting questions pertaining to whether good governance may lead to sustained economic growth. This book looks at the strategic interventions on macro-level, specifically the policy interventions. This book will be a useful reference to making sense how economic transformation can be strengthened through state-sponsored activities and how states can inculcate a culture of innovation which can be regarded as one of the underpinnings of economic growth.

This book analyzes the relationship between technological innovation and economic development in Japan before World War II. Guan Quan deploys econometric analysis, multivariate statistical analysis and case studies from different industries to shed light on technological innovation in the Japanese context with particular emphasis on the importance of the patent system. A great deal of new inventions and patents in this period led to fast economic growth in Japan characterized by the simultaneous development of both traditional and modern industries. These insights help reshape the understanding of Japan's economic development and industrial advancement at an early stage and provide pointers to developing countries as to how human capital, social capabilities and thereby technological innovation can figure in economic growth. The book will appeal to academics of the East Asian economy, development economics and modern economic history as well as general readers interested in the miracle of the Japanese economy as the first to achieve economic development and modernization among non-Western countries.

Marx's Capital, Capitalism and Limits to the State examines the capitalist state in the abstract, and as it exists in advanced capitalism and peripheral capitalism, illustrating the ideas with evidence from the North and the South. The volume unpacks the capitalist state's functions in relation to commodity relations, private property, and the crisis-ridden production of (surplus) value as a part of the capital circuit (M-C-M'). It also examines state's political and geographical forms. It argues that no matter how autonomous it is, the state cannot meet the pressing needs of the masses significantly and sustainably. This is not because of so-called capitalist constraints, but because the state is inherently capitalist. Each chapter begins with Capital volume 1. And each chapter ends with theoretical/practical implications of the ideas which taken together counter existing state theory's focus on state autonomy and reforms and point to the necessity for the masses to establish a new transitional democratic state. But the book goes 'beyond' Marx too, as it deploys the combined Marxism of 19th and 20th centuries. Marx's Capital, Capitalism and Limits to the State will interest scholars researching state-society/economy relations. It is suitable for university students as well as established scholars in sociology, political science, heterodox economics, human geography, and international development.

In contrast to neo-classical mainstream approaches to economics, this innovative Modern Guide addresses the complex reality of economic development as an inherently uneven process, exploring the ways of theorizing and empirically exploring the mechanisms with which the unevenness manifests itself. Advancing experience-based theories in the debate of economic development, this Modern Guide provides a qualitative, holistic and nuanced understanding of economic inequality by uniquely combining explanations from a large number of academic fields. It covers a wide array of issues influencing wealth and poverty, technological innovation, ecology and sustainability, financialization, population, gender and geography, and considers the dynamics of cumulative causations created by the interplay between these factors. By looking at falling real wages, world income distribution, and refugees and migrants in poorer regions, it ultimately explains why wealth and poverty are so unevenly distributed globally. The cutting-edge discussions in this Modern Guide will prove invaluable for students and scholars from a range of disciplines including economics and development studies. In today's world of 'single-issue management', the alternative theories of mutual influence in this book will prove useful to policy makers working across a variety of economic fields.

The 'feminisation of poverty' is widely viewed as a global trend, and of particular concern in developing regions. Yet although popularisation of the term may have raised women's visibility in development discourses and gone some way to 'en-gender' policies for poverty reduction, the construct is only weakly substantiated. Its over-emphasis on income and on female household headship also conveys little of the contemporary complexities of gendered disadvantage. In Gender, Generation and Poverty Sylvia Chant challenges the 'feminisation of poverty' on the basis of recent fieldwork in The Gambia, Philippines and Costa Rica. Interviews with over 220 women and men of different ages at the grassroots, as well as with 40 professionals in international agencies, government departments and NGOs, highlight the difficulties of establishing any general tendency towards a widening of gender disparities in income poverty, or for female household heads to be the 'poorest of the poor'. While not denying a 'female bias' in material privation, a more important and consistent pattern is that women are bearing an ever-greater burden of responsibility for household survival, and under especially exploitative conditions in male-headed units. These findings lead Chant to propose a more elaborate and nuanced construction of the 'feminisation of poverty' which incorporates inputs as well as incomes and takes greater account of gender relations within the home. This not only stands to enrich gendered poverty analysis, but to provide a more appropriate basis for policy interventions. This volume will not only be an important resource for scholars of development, gender and area studies in Africa, Asia and Latin America, but also for professionals and activists working towards the elimination of poverty and gender inequality at national and international levels.

A decade and a half since the Philippines embarked on a major program of decentralization, the authors of this book have undertaken a detailed examination of all aspects of the nation's regional dynamics and policies. Their analysis extends to comparable experiences in East Asia, particularly China and Indonesia. The lessons of this book are relevant not only for an audience interested in the Philippines - a large developing nation with a population soon to exceed 100 million people - but also for many other developing countries now embarking on decentralization programs. The book therefore has broad international appeal. The contributors focus on three main issues: * Centre-region relations. While the decentralization program in the Philippines has been reasonably successful, they argue there is an urgent need for a clear, predictable, and stable regulatory environment that governs centre-region administrative and financial relations. * Infrastructure. This is arguably the most important policy tool in shaping regional development patterns, yet decision-makers are rarely able to develop these investments on the basis of a coherent and integrated policy framework. * The conflict in Mindanao. This deep and protracted conflict must be resolved for the benefit of the local and national population. This enlightening and topical book will appeal to postgraduate students of economic development, regional development/science, rural development, and Asian Studies. It will also attract the interest of researchers and practitioners in international development agencies, NGOs, and policymakers and legislators in developing countries.

This book applies and develops the concept of "ersatz capitalism" in the analysis of industrial policy blockades to economic development in Malaysia and Indonesia. Drawing on insights from international political economy, development studies, industrial and innovation policy, and new institutionalism to refer to a specific type of capitalism, the book analyzes different paths and institutions of economic development within the entire East Asian region. Comprehensive theoretical insights are complemented by empirical case studies that relate to country and sectoral studies - the automotive and ICT industries - in Malaysia and Indonesia. Applying contemporary research on international political economy to refer to a specific type of capitalism, the author examines how conflicts of interest between factions of state apparatus, associations, and companies contribute to the failure of developmental policies. The unique combination of theory formation and empirical analysis provides a novel approach to international comparative research on capitalism. The book will be of interest to researchers in the fields of international political economy, development studies, new institutionalism, East Asian and Southeast Asian studies, and industrial and innovation policy.

Using data from the World Values Survey, this book sheds light on the link between happiness and the social group to which one belongs. The work is based on a rigorous statistical analysis of differences in the probability of happiness and life satisfaction between the predominant social group and subordinate groups. The cases of India and South Africa receive deep attention in dedicated chapters on cast and race, with other chapters considering issues such as cultural bias, religion, patriarchy, and gender. An additional chapter offers a global perspective. On top of this, the longitudinal nature of the data facilitates an examination of how world happiness has evolved between 1994 and 2014. This book will be a valuable reference for advanced students, scholars and policymakers involved in development economics, well-being, development geography, and sociology.

The starting point of this book is the observation that there is a discrepancy between the lived reality of human beings and the fabricated, planned, and governed 'reality' of the state apparatus at both the local and national level. The book posits multi-locality as an emerging spatial configuration. The author draws from various theoretical sources, such as Deleuze and Guattari's concepts of state or royal science, the Nietzschean critique of idealism, Hagerstrnad's time-geography, Hintikka's theory of modalities, Lefebvre's urban society, Castel's network society, Foucault's concept of heterotopia, and Bhaskar's and Sartre's theories of presence and absence. He also discusses the implications of Faludi's post-territorialist critique of planning and governance, and of the failure to operationalise the concept quantitively, basing his arguments in the lived experiences of multi-locals as well. The novelty of the book is how it analyses multi-locality from such a wide theoretical perspective: what is the nature and meaning of the different multiple and coexistent places for people, and how is this spatial transformation related to their mobility, everyday practices, and work. How does the presence and absence of places form their identity and their citizenship? He also addresses the inconsistency between multi-locality and traditional statistics and the planning and governance practices based on the assumption of unilocality and discusses the implications of this incongruity. The book will be of interest to scholars in urban studies and planning theory, as well as practitioners developing more adequate practices replacing outdated ones.

Plenty has been written on the competitiveness of megacities, capital cities, and regional hubs. Cities in developing countries have not yet received the same attention - this book fills that gap. An international team of expert academics have come together to present a comprehensive study of the competitiveness of cities in the developing world. Spanning Asia, Africa, and Latin America, this book homes in on specific city cases and examines how they relate to the rest of the global economy. The focus is on acknowledging their unique contexts, while drawing out commonalities, and ultimately identifying ways for them to enhance their competitiveness, wellbeing, and sustainability. This volume will be valuable reading to advanced students, researchers, and policymakers in urban and regional studies, economic geography, and economic development.

This book explores the emergence and development of the legal concept of fair and equitable benefit-sharing, and its application in agriculture. Developed in the 1990s, the concept of fair and equitable benefit-sharing has been deployed in an ever-wider variety of international instruments, including those on biodiversity, climate change and human rights. A lack of clarity persists, however, on what fair and equitable benefit-sharing requires and entails, and whether its implementation supports or eventually undermines equity and justice. This book examines these questions in the area of land, food and agriculture, addressing for the first time several instances of the agricultural production chain, including research and development, land governance and land use and access to markets. It identifies challenges regarding implementation of the concept as enshrined in environmental treaties and soft-law instruments, with a focus on the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, the Voluntary Guidelines on Tenure and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants. It investigates its role, enabling conditions and limitations, in a contradictory policy context involving environmental, food security and human rights objectives but also a growing web of multilateral and bilateral trade and investment agreements. Linking international law research with a socio-legal analysis, the book addresses four grassroots examples, which offer ideas for institutional and legal innovation from the local to the global level. This interdisciplinary title will be of great interest to students and scholars of international environmental law, agriculture, land law, development studies and global governance, as well as policymakers and practitioners working in these fields. "The Open Access version of this book, available at https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429198304, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license."

This is a first of its kind book which examines the remittances in the two largest corridors in the World: India-Saudi Arabia and Mexico-U.S.A. This book aims to treat remittances as an act of social norm involving individuals, nation-states, and diaspora communities. It treats remittances both as an act of individual obligation as well as a social fact that needs to be understood from the perspective of the actors, i.e., the givers and recipients. Using theories of motives of giving, policy analysis, international development, and international relations, the authors offer a compelling narrative of how and why remittances occur and the impacts on both the giver and recipient. The authors - both scholars of philanthropy and remittances - bring their shared perspective and understanding of this crucial phenomenon and delve deep into examining its impacts on community development and the relations between the nation-states. This book offers a sophisticated understanding of how vital remittances are to the world we live in. The book sheds light on this important social reality and will be of value to researchers, academics, and students interested in remittances, as well as to practitioners working in the international development sector, NGO actors, and policy makers.

This book focuses on the Base of the Pyramid (BOP) in Africa and examines the role of the private sector in the fight against poverty. The BOP concept, which is a market-based approach to poverty eradication, presents a great avenue for businesses to develop opportunities and new business models that enable and empower those in the BOP population in Africa to raise their socio-economic welfare and well-being. The BOP market and the business interest in the BOP in Africa is rising. This book furthers our understanding of the characteristics of BOP markets in Africa, and the challenges and opportunities to address poverty and development in a sustainable manner. The book covers various themes of BOP markets and their embeddedness in social-cultural settings in Africa. The different chapters employ a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches to advance research and practice of BOP in Africa. The book chapters reflect multiple diversities that characterise sub-Saharan Africa based on studies in 13 country contexts and from five industry sectors. This book is recommended reading for managers and policy makers, as well as students and academics interested in Base of the Pyramid markets.

Researchers in international development have long argued that the high costs of doing business harms prosperity in developing countries, a claim that invites the question of why governments impose these costs and why societies fail to enact reforms reducing them. This book seeks to answer the question by looking at the case of Brazil, a large and highly unequal economy riddled with state-imposed transaction costs. By delving into the political dynamics underlying a costly business environment, this book provides the reader with novel insights into crony capitalism and inequality. It argues that the root cause of a costly business environment is the collusion between political actors, bureaucrats and business insiders. Politicians and bureaucrats relish their discretion over rules and policies as a power resource, since they can increase or decrease the costs of doing business faced by firms and sectors. Business insiders collude with government agents to access the loopholes that decrease the cost of doing business, thus gaining a competitive edge over outsiders. This gives the insiders weaker preferences for reforms that could decrease the overall cost of doing business. By pursuing their self-interest, these actors create a low-level equilibrium that perpetuates crony capitalism and inequality to the detriment of overall prosperity. The book makes its case with a sophisticated combination of formal modeling, quantitative analyses and in-depth case studies of tax policy and of the pharmaceutical and agricultural sectors in Brazil. Observers have declared the need for reforms that improve the business environment in developing countries for a long time. However, the findings presented in this book suggest they might have underestimated the challenge ahead. Scholars and policy-makers in international development, business politics and political economy will be interested in the innovative perspective of this book.

Since the doi moi reforms in 1986, Vietnam has experienced a dramatic socioeconomic transformation. Lim examines the role of the state and its interaction with market forces in bringing this change about. Taking the motorcycle and banking industries as case studies, this book explores the dynamics between the state and transnational corporations in shaping the manufacturing and service sectors, respectively. Vietnam, as one of Southeast Asia's quintessential latecomer economies with little prior experience of dealing with transnational corporations, has nevertheless been quite successful in maintaining some control over the impact of foreign direct investment. Yet, the learning outcomes remain highly uneven. In addition, Lim argues that Vietnamese advancement in both industries mirrors only partially the more generalized patterns of state-led development in East Asia's earlier batch of latecomer economies. Vietnam's case thus presents practical lessons on how to succeed in crafting and utilizing policy instruments to achieve domestic economic and technological upgrading. This book will be of great interest to scholars of political economy and industrial policy in East Asia, as well as to scholars and policy professionals analyzing approaches to development strategy more broadly.

This book critically examines different forms of urban-rural links for sustainable development in different countries. As intertwined processes of globalization, digitalization, environmental challenges and the search for sustainable development continue, rural and urban areas around the world become increasingly interconnected and interdependent. This book contributes to understanding the role of this growing interconnectedness from an economic geographical perspective. It does so by theoretically and empirically addressing the various existing linkages, such as food networks, value chains, and regional governance at local, regional, national and international levels. In doing so, contributions extend and contrast existing approaches dealing with urban and rural areas separately by considering the interplay between these two as well as their consequences for sustainability transition pathways. This edited volume adds to the academic and policy debate by bringing together a variety of concepts and themes in order to shift the research and policy agenda away from simple dichotomy to different notions of rural-urban linkages. Offering multidisciplinary insights into rural-urban linkages, the book will be of interest to decision-makers, practitioners and researchers in the fields of economic geography, regional planning, food studies and economics.

Culture is a priceless inheritance and source of wellbeing that is of immense value to humankind. Cultural economics set out to examine the nature and social benefits of cultural products and phenomena as they exist in the market. This volume is the masterpiece of Li Yining, one of the best-known Chinese economists, active in devoting his attention to the role of culture in the economy since the 1950s. Considering the importance of culture in the development of socialism with Chinese characteristics, the author combines cultural history, economic history, and the history of economic thought to produce unique perspectives. This book not only introduces the central concepts of cultural economics and the culture industry, but proposes several groundbreaking views that greatly influenced the culture policies of China, including cultural adjustment, cultural confidence, and cultural checks and balances. Researchers and students of economics, cultural studies, and Chinese politics, as well as policy makers, will benefit from this volume.

The contributors to this book explore the current situation of North Korea in various aspects and provide policy suggestions for North Korea to become part of the international community and achieve sustainable development. Focusing on three key areas of economic development, namely, international sectors, agriculture and urban development, and energy and environment, this book lays out recommendations and prospects for North Korea. Authors assess the current situation of North Korea, explore preconditions for becoming a member of the international community, and suggest policies necessary for the sustainable development of North Korea. They cover a wide range of areas including reforestation, WTO accession, and the potential for economic integration with South Korea. These evaluations draw on both what is understood about the current situation in North Korea and comparisons with other countries and territories. This book will be a valuable resource for scholars and policy planners who focus on North Korea.

Authoritative and contemporary research on the economic expansion of Southern China is collected in this major new volume which explores models and patterns of development in Guangdong, with particular emphasis on the differences across this economically vibrant region. Economic and Social Development in South China brings together research by a pioneering team of academic researchers and includes statistical data on the Pearl River Delta as well as analysis of the metropolitan development in Guangzhou municipal city, civil service reform and social policy in Shenzhen, Guangzhou's municipal leadership and the basic level elections in the region since 1979. Other issues discussed include foreign outward direct investment from Guangdong, the creation of effective environmental law, foreign investment in Guangdong and the emergence of private education in the Pearl River Delta. Southern China's creative approaches to the difficulties and problems encountered since reforms began in the 1970s is rigorously analysed and explored by scholars with exceptional access to local sources and data. Economic and Social Development in South China shows how the use of competing models of economic development encouraged by the authorities will influence and shape the future of the country as a whole.

This book examines trends and determinants of economic inequality in cities in Latin America, the world's most unequal region. It explores how the gap between the haves and the have nots manifests in every part of urban life - from housing to schooling to employment. It asks why some cities have higher inequality than others and what we can learn from these differences as we push back against inequality. The book starts with reviewing the policies and forces that explain the rise and fall of inequality in Latin America since the 1990s and why progress in reducing inequality has stalled. It then focuses on Argentina's cities and applies a set of quantitative tools to identify inequality determinants. It finds that intra-urban inequality generally mirrors national-level trends, but local idiosyncrasies related to a city's labor market, informal employment, and social protection systems matter. The book discusses the pitfalls of privatizing public services that turned access to water in metropolitan Buenos Aires more unequal. It explores the promises and unintended consequences of slum upgrading initiatives in Buenos Aires' Villa 20. The book presents lessons that can inform policies and practices in the region and beyond. Developing a strategy against inequality that incorporates local features and resists the temptation to rely on the "free market" for solutions to urban problems offers a powerful opportunity. Drawing from the field of economics and social and urban policy, this book shows that the battle against inequality is not only won and lost in cities but also requires a uniquely public and urban response. As such, it will be of interest to advanced students, researchers, and policymakers across development economics, urban studies, and Latin American studies.

"Five-Year Plans" have been a cornerstone of Chinese social and economic development initiatives since 1953. During the thirteenth of these periods between 2016 and 2020, the global economy has experienced instability after the financial crisis, as well as political and economic reconfiguration. Drawing on modern economic theory, this book comprehensively discusses China's economic development in this crucial phase. The book analyzes the international economic environment, and asks how China's continued reform and opening-up can fit with the new era of economic globalization. It also presents the difficulties China faces in such fields as urbanization, the coordination of regional development and urban-rural integration, economic reform, and the reform of factor markets and state-owned enterprises. The book outlines many medium-term development rules along with key characteristics of China's economy, helping international readers fully understand likely future trajectories for the Chinese economy.