Written by fifteen leading academics from the Japan Society for International Development (JASID), this book undertakes a review of Japan's economic development over the last 150 years, and seeks to clarify Japanese priorities in domestic and foreign policy for the coming decades.

SCOTT (Copy 1): From the John Holmes Library Collection.

A comprehensive and systematic account of the core topics in development economics, this book examines the reasons why a few countries have achieved a high level of affluence while the majority remain poor and stagnant. It represents an original combination of classical political economy, modern institutional theory, and current development issues, bound together through the East Asian development experience. This fully revised second edition also analyses some recent changes and newly emerged problems relevant to the global economy. - ;This textbook provides a comprehensive, systematic treatise on development economics, combining classical political economy, modern institutional theory, and current development issues. It has grown out of thirty years' experience of teaching undergraduate and postgraduate students in the United States, Japan and other parts of Asia. The treatment is global, although the organizing principle is the East Asian development experience. Quantitative characteristics of Third World development in terms of population growth, natural resource depletion, capital accumulation, and technological change are outlined; but the central approach is comparative institutional analysis. "Development Economics" addresses one major question: Why has a small set of countries achieved a high level of affluence while the majority remain poor and stagnant? Why, in turn, has the number of developing economies set on the track of closing their productivity gap with advance economies been so limited? One obvious factor underlying this global divergence is unevenness in the ability to adopt and develop advanced technology, due in large measure to the difficulty experienced by low-income economies in preparing appropriate institutions for borrowing advanced technology given their social and cultural constraints. The major task of this volume is to explore the nature of these binding constraints, with the aim of identifying the means to remove them. Comparisons are made with countries where the constraints have been successfully lifted---most notably Japan and East Asian NIEs. This fully revised and updated second edition also incorporates analyses of several recent changes and newly emerged problems relevant to the global economy: the 1997-98 financial crisis in East Asia, the Kyoto Protocol signed in 1997 at the Third Conference of Parties for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, and the deceleration in growth of agricultural productivity in Asia. Exploration of these issues provides important lessons on how to sustain economic growth based on technology borrowing. -

It is 1868, and Carl Erik's family faces starvation in Sweden. As their hopes fade, they must endure a journey over land and sea to reach a better life in a new country thousands of miles away. Book jacket.

A maverick economist explains how protectionism makes nations rich, free trade keeps them poor---and how rich countries make sure to keep it that way. Throughout history, some combination of government intervention, protectionism, and strategic investment has driven successful development everywhere from Renaissance Italy to the modern Far East. Yet despite the demonstrable success of this approach, development economists largely ignore it and insist instead on the importance of free trade. Somehow, the thing that made rich nations rich supposedly won't work on poor countries anymore. Leading heterodox economist Erik Reinert's invigorating history of economic development shows how Western economies were founded on protectionism and state activism and only later promoted free trade, when it worked to their advantage. In the tug-of-war between the gospel of government intervention and free-market purists, the issue is not that one is more correct, but that the winning nation tends to favor whatever benefits them most. As Western countries begin to sense that the rules of the game they set were rigged, Reinert's classic book gains new urgency. His unique and edifying approach to the history of economic development is critical reading for anyone who wants to understand how we got here and what to do next, especially now that we aren't so sure we'll be the winners anymore.