Economic Growth and Development

by Hendrik Van Den Berg

This textbook by Hendrik Van den Berg on Economic Growth and Development presents a long-awaited synthesis of Development Economics and Growth Theory. It also incorporates the recent contributions to our understanding of economic growth from the fields of economic history and the new institutional economics. By basing its analysis on the recent advances in growth theory, the book offers a unified approach to all episodes of economic growth for countries at all levels of development and throughout history. Students will be comfortable with an analysis that enables them to understand economic growth in their own country as well as in economies very different from their own. The unified theoretical framework greatly facilitates students’ understanding of the process of economic growth, and the many cases and examples highlight the fascinating diversity of our world.

Genres: Economics

640 pages, Hardcover

First published March 13, 2001

Reviews

[Afonso Dimas Martins · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was outdated even before it was published because so much of its conclusions stem from wrong assumptions and unsourced statements. The best part of the book were the case studies, but even those were not safe from being interpreted from a deeply colonial and capitalist mindset where ze price stabilité is the answer to all problems. Here, all of human development is due to economic growth (measured by dubious metrics). For example, in chapter 2, there's a discussion on attempts to overcome discrimination against Dalits in India's caste system. A follower of Gandhi worked on a way to avoid resorting to manual scavenging work of Dalits by creating inexpensive toilets. In other words, people got together and implemented plumbing with cheap materials. The book's interpretation: it was economic growth.

Another example is how when discussing the USSR economy stagnation in the late 90s, it bashes socialism as a massive failure, while when discussing the same stagnation or worse within capitalist societies, like global economic crises due to speculation, there's never a criticism of capitalism: it was all just inevitable diminishing returns or some other excuse. All the models in this textbook are untestable and unfalsifiable, but treated like gospel, and capitalism venerated as the final solution.

And don't get me started on how they justify the Dutch settling and displacing Native Americans because "the Indians didn't have properly defined property rights". Complete bullshit. A textbook to hate-read only.

[Mills College Library]

338.9 V227 2012