This collection of essays, based on a conference at the Hoover
Institution, compares the governmental policies and institutional
determinants of economic development for sixteen countries within
the context of Western economic development and national trends in
the world economy. The study also includes an essay by Amartya Sen
that examines the meaning of wealth and its different
measurements.
This "tour d'horizon" of countries having different cultures,
resource endowments, and economic and political systems makes the
following arguments. First, governmental policies and institutions
or rules that determined how and what resources were allocated
among agriculture, manufacturing, and other economic activities
proved crucial for whether a nation experienced--according to Adam
Smith--"the natural progress or opulence" toward creating more
wealth.
Second, these empirical case studies reveal that national
governments' success in creating wealth depended on whether their
economies evolved according to three normative patterns of
development: An efficacious circle of four interacting activities:
a more equitable distribution of income, a rising market demand for
goods and services, an increasing share of savings of gross
domestic product, and more investment in physical and human
capitalAvoiding large wage increases and inflationA gradual shift
from relying on the domestic market to integrating with the
international market economy
Finally, those governmental policies and institutional changes
that facilitated the market process rather than impeding it were
more successful in creating wealth than those that tried to replace
the market place with central planning or obstruct the market
process by various regulatory means.
This collection contains contributions from Amartya Sen, Lamont
University Professor at Harvard University; economic historians
Douglass C. North, Nobel Prize laureate, and Kozo Yamamamura; and
development economists David Bevan, Robert Christiansen, Paul
Collier, Nicholas Eberstadt, Albert Fishlow, Jan Willem Gunning,
Alan Heston, Jan Hogendorn, Victor Lavy, Angus Maddison, Ramon H.
Myers, and Gur Ofer.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!