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This book provides a survey of different ways in which economic sociocultural and political aspects of human progress have been studied since the time of Adam Smith. Inevitably, over such a long time span, it has been necessary to concentrate on highlighting the most significant contributions, rather than attempting an exhaustive treatment. The aim has been to bring into focus an outline of the main long-term changes in the way that socioeconomic development has been envisaged. The argument presented is that the idea of socioeconomic development emerged with the creation of grand evolutionary sequences of social progress that were the products of Enlightenment and mid-Victorian thinkers. By the middle of the twentieth century, when interest in the accelerating development gave the topic a new impetus, its scope narrowed to a set of economically based strategies. After 1960, however, faith in such strategies began to wane, in the face of indifferent results and general faltering of confidence in economists' boasts of scientific expertise. In the twenty-first century, development research is being pursued using a research method that generates disconnected results. As a result, it seems unlikely that any grand narrative will be created in the future and that neo-liberalism will be the last of this particular kind of socioeconomic theory.

Although Robert Solow never applied his neoclassical growth model to an underdeveloped country, neither did he ever exclude underdeveloped countries from its scope. For a generation, the model's use to predict worldwide convergence in levels of per capita income provided the main link from growth theory to development economics. In the last two decades, augmented Solow models, endogenous growth models, and exercises in development accounting have proliferated. Nevertheless, it is argued, the formalization of development economics and the post-1980 dominance of neoclassical development economics at the World Bank were driven as much by the theory of trade distortions as by the revival of interest in growth models and growth accounting.

The production of social knowledge in all international organizations is problematic because all are public bureaucracies. The World Bank provides a case study of the problems of managing in-house research in an international public bureaucracy. Not only are there managerial constraints on what the Bank is willing to publish, but the binding constraints on publication evolve. The evolution in managerial objectives at the Bank in recent years and the factors that have influenced shifts in its rhetoric and policy are examined. Are these adjustments merely rhetorical? Recent research on poverty reduction, governance and conditionality is discussed to gauge how far the Bank has moved.

AbstractThis paper argues that, notwithstanding the current global recession, the tripling of food prices in the period 2005–2008 presages a permanent increase in the average real price of food over the next 30 years. The underlying causes are likely to be rising energy prices, adverse effects of climate change on agriculture and rising food consumption in Asia. The consequences will be increased social and political turbulence of the urban poor and misguided government policies to try to mitigate this instability. Adam Smith's invisible hand indicates the shape of more constructive policies, consistent with economic development objectives. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.