A Modern Guide to Uneven Economic Development (Elgar Modern Guides)

Description

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. Front Matter Copyright Contents Contributors Introduction: uneven development – addressing causes versus treating symptoms PART I Nature-made versus policy-made sources of uneven development 1. Uneven economic development: identifying the blind spots of mainstream economics 2. Geography, uneven development and population density: attempting a non-ethnocentric approach to development 3. Redirecting growth: inclusive, sustainable and innovation-led PART II Assumptions, abstractions and approaches to uneven development 4. Altered states: Cartesian and Ricardian dreams 5. Gender and uneven development 6. Dependency theory: strengths, weaknesses, and its relevance today 7. The need to centre imperialism in studies of uneven development 8. Imperialism: a note on the unequal treaties of modern China and Japan PART III Understanding mechanisms that create and prevent inequality 9. Physiocracy, guillotines and antisemitism? Did economics emulate the wrong Enlightenment? 10. Technological retrogression and persistent poverty PART IV When nations and systems decline and collapse 11. When nations collapse: a note on Jacob Bielfeld’s ‘On the Decline of States’ (1760) 12. Free trade with the former COMECON countries as unequal exchange 13. Escaping the poverty trap in China: the co-evolution of diversity in property and economic development 14. Recent experiences of successful economic policies: the case of Uzbekistan PART V Finance versus the real economy 15. Uneven development, financialised capitalism and subordination 16. Unequal growth and the single currency: the fiscal policy paradox PART VI Ecology 17. Identifying ecologically unequal exchange in the world-system: implications for development Conclusion: what are the important lessons from history? Index