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Arts & books

Puzzles of development

  27th April 2008  —  Issue 145
Dani Rodrik avoids the single-template prescriptions of both the Washington consensus crowd and the anti-globalisers. His thoughtful and modest book shows that there are many routes to economic development

One Economics, Many Recipes: Globalization, Institutions, and Economic Growth
by Dani Rodrik (Princeton, £23.95)

Development, Dani Rodrik writes, has been a success, although development policy has not. In the last decade, more people have escaped poverty than in any previous decade of history. Most of them live in China, India and other countries in south and east Asia. Elsewhere—in Latin America, Africa, the middle east—there have been as many steps back as forward.

In surveying this diverse international experience, Rodrik cites with approval Larry Summers’s assessment: “The rate at which countries grow is substantially determined by three things: their ability to integrate with the global economy through trade and investment; their capacity to maintain sustainable government finances and social money; their ability to put in place an institutional environment in which contracts can be enforced and property rights can be established.” This sounds conventional. But the subtlety of Summers’s description, as Rodrik explains, is that what matters is not individual policies as such but the effect of all policies taken together.

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  1. SALEEM_YOUSAF says:

    rodricks thinking is very flawed,i come from Pakistan which has millions of young men working abroad,the money they send back is not developing the country,it is making them welfare dependent,it is also sending property prices sky due to massive property speculation,little industry or commercial business is being created
    The nutter who suggested that this is a way to develop your economy by sending the brightest and best abroad to work as cheap labour for rich countries,needs some serious therapy
    People have to organize,agitate for change to better their lives
    When Singapore,Taiwan and Korea was industrializing they did not send their best people abroad to work as cheap labour