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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

For facilitating the development of a consensus on the concept of social capital among economists, this paper proposes its operational definition in a way consistent with the definitions of physical and human capital and discusses the relevance on the use of the metaphor of capital for social capital. Further, the unique characteristics in the production and accumulation of social capital in comparison with physical and human capital are identified in relation with the community which is considered the central mechanism to produce social capital. The merits and drawbacks of the community relative to the market and the state are examined with the aim of identifying the conditions under which social capital can be supplied efficiently in the direction of promoting economic progress. Adapted from the source document.

The process by which different ecological conditions and historical trajectories interacted to create different social and cultural systems resulted in major differences in economic development performance within Southeast Asia. In the late 19th century, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand commonly experienced vent-for-surplus development through exploitation of unused lands. Nevertheless, different agrarian structures were created. Indonesia s development was mainly based on the exploitation of tropical rain forest under Dutch colonialism. It resulted in the bifurcation of the rural sector between rice-farming peasant proprietors and large plantations for tropical export crops based on hired labor. In the Philippines, exploitation of the same resource base under Spanish rule resulted in pervasive landlessness among the rural population. Relatively homogeneous landowning peasants continued to dominate in Thailand, where delta plains that were suitable only for rice production formed the resource base for development. These different agrarian structures associated with different social value systems have accounted for differential development performance across the three economies in the recent three decades.

According to Myint's "vent-for-surplus" theory, development of the economies of Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand from the nineteenth century on depended on the natural advantage of large tracts of unused "empty land" with low population density and abundant natural resources of the type typically found in Southeast Asia and Africa at the outset of Western colonization. When these economies were integrated into international trade, hitherto unused natural resources (primary commodities the indigenous people had not valued) became the source of economic development, commanding market value because of high import demand in Western economies. The major delta of Chao Phraya River was the resource base of vent-for-surplus development with rice in Thailand; tropical rain forests filled that role in Indonesia and the Philippines with respect to the production of tropical cash crops. This basic difference underlay differences in the distribution of farm size: the unimodal distribution of peasants or family farms in Thailand and the coexistence of peasants and large estate farms or plantations specializing in tropical export crops in Indonesia and the Philippines. Differences in agrarian development were also shaped by different policies toward the elites preemption of unused land. Under Spanish colonialism, the elite preempted unused land in the Philippines wholesale, bifurcating land distribution between non-cultivating landlords and sharecroppers in lowland rice areas, and between plantation owners and wage laborers in upland areas. In Indonesia, the Dutch government granted long-term leases for uncultivated public land to foreign planters, but prevented alienation of cultivated land from native peasants, to avoid social instability. In Thailand, concessions were granted for private canal building, but the independent kingdom preserved the tradition of giving land to anyone who could open and cultivate it. Relatively homogenous land-owning peasants dominated Thailand's rural sector. As frontiers for new cultivation closed, the plantation systems initial advantage (large-scale development of land and infrastructure) began to be outweighed by its need to monitor hired labor. The peasant system, based on family labor needing no supervision, allowed Thailand's share of the world market in tropical cash crops to grow, as Indonesia and the Philippines lost their traditional comparative advantage. Moreover, land reform in the Philippines made land markets inactive, with resulting distortions in resource allocation and serious underinvestment in agriculture.