Introduction to “Rethink Economic Development, Growth and Institutions”

Abstract

This article is an introduction to the book “Rethinking economic development, growth, and institutions” (forthcoming in Oxford University Press, 2013). It presents a summary of the main theses and themes addressed by the book: the recent developments in the economics of growth and development, with particular attention to the ascent of the new institutional economics, the controversies on the fundamental determinants of development levels, the role of aggregate demand in the growth process and the progress of endogenous growth theory. Above all, it argues for reconsidering and incorporating in the mainstream of the discipline the insights of classical development theory, by which I mean the contribu tions of the pioneers of development economics in the 1950s, whose main characteristics come from considering heterogeneous economies, subject to technological and pecuniary externalities associated with increasing returns to scale and the existence of wide sectors with labor surpluses, in which growth is viewed as the transition from low level to high level equilibria, resulting from resource reallocation, structural change and the endogeneity of technological change and productivity advances