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  • Book cover of Bondhu: My Father, My Friend
  • Book cover of The Developer's Dilemma

    This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 IGO licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Developing countries seek economic development which is broad-based or inclusive in the sense that it raises the income of all, especially the poor. Yet this is at odds with Simon Kuznets' hypothesis that economic development tends to put upward pressure on income inequality, at least initially and in the absence of countervailing policies. The Developer's Dilemma explores this 'Kuznetsian tension' between structural transformation and income inequality. The book asks: what are the varieties of structural transformation that have been experienced in developing countries? What inequality dynamics are associated with each variety of structural transformation? And what policies have been utilized to manage trade-offs between structural transformation, income inequality, and inclusive growth? Across nine country cases written by academics across the Global South, this book answers these questions using a comparative case study approach with a common analytical framework and a set of common datasets. The intended intellectual contribution of the book is to provide a comparative analysis of the relationship between structural transformation, income inequality, and inclusive growth; to do so empirically at a regional and national level, and to draw conclusions about the varieties of structural transformation, their inequality dynamics, and the policies that have been employed to mediate the developer's dilemma.

  • Book cover of Pathways to Development

    This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-BC-ND 4.0 International License. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. The puzzle of why some countries are wealthier and more developed than others continues to confound students and practitioners of development alike. Whereas earlier grand explanations focused on issues of 'geography' or 'institutions', the second decade of the 21st century finally saw 'politics' arrive centre-stage within international development. This catalyzed a search to answer the key question: under what conditions do governments become committed to and capable of delivering development? How can these processes be conceptualized and researched? And what (if anything) can be done to 'get the politics right' for development? Pathways to Development draws on a major comparative research effort to present new answers to the question of how politics shapes development. It develops and applies a 'power domains' framework across multiple countries in the global South to uncover the political drivers of development across a wide range of policy areas, including economic growth, gender equity, health, and education. Hickey and Sen find that a country's pathway to development is shaped less by institutional type than by the nature of the politics and power relations that underpinned these institutions and which shape how they actually function in practice within different policy domains. Comparative analysis reveals two alternative pathways to developmental outcomes, each of which is specific to particular configurations of power. The first involves a dominant ruling coalition with a strong developmental vision that faces an existential threat from social forces; the second involves competitive settlements within which the short-term vision of ruling elites and the politicization of the public bureaucracy are offset by the presence of strong and coherent coalitions within particular policy domains. Hickey and Sen use these insights to generate innovative, practical suggestions for policy actors seeking to promote inclusive development that are aligned to critical differences in political context.

  • Book cover of Trade Policy, Inequality and Performance in Indian Manufacturing
    Kunal Sen

     · 2008

    The relationship between trade policy and economic performance is one of the oldest controversies in economic development. In recent years, there has been a revival of interest in the debate on the implications of trade reforms for productivity growth and domestic pricing behaviour due in part to the current phase of wide-spread trade liberalisatio

  • Book cover of Varieties of Structural Transformation
    Kunal Sen

     · 2023

    One of the key features of modern economic growth is the process of structural transformation, which is the movement of workers from agriculture to manufacturing and services. In this study, the author identifies different routes to structural transformation that we see in the developing world. They address the theoretical, empirical and policy implications of the 'varieties of structural transformation' in low and middle income countries. Firstly, using a comparable high-quality dataset, they set out the stylized facts of structural transformation across the developing world. Secondly, they assess the classical and neoclassical approaches to structural transformation and review the recent theoretical developments in the literature. Thirdly, they undertake descriptive and econometric analysis of the drivers of structural transformation, and the relationship between structural transformation and inequality. Finally, they assess the policy implications of our study for developing countries. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

  • Book cover of The Political Economy of India's Growth Episodes

    ‘This book is different from most other attempts to understand the politics of Indian economic development. Breaking down the last 65+ years of Indian development into several episodes of growth, it provides a rich set of insights into the political economy of the Indian development process and is a valuable addition to the literature.’ –Pranab Bardham, University of California, Berkeley, USA ‘Sustained economic growth in the world's largest democracy is critically important to human well-being, but the ups and downs of growth in India are not well-understood. This book provides a fresh and insightful approach to understanding what drives the starts of booms and the onset of slowdowns.’ –Lant Pritchett, Harvard University, USA ‘This is a little book with big arguments. The authors' explanation of the changing character of the deals done between political and business elites makes for the most original contribution to studies of the political economy of Indian development since Pranab Bardhan's seminal work of the early 1980s’ –John Harriss, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada This book moves beyond the usual economic analysis of the Indian growth story and provides a fresh perspective on the determinants of growth episodes in post-independence India, based on its political economy. Using a robust and novel technique, the authors identify four such episodes during this period. The first, running from the 1950s to 1992, was mostly characterized by economic stagnation, with a nascent recovery in the eighties. The second, covering the period 1993 to 2001, witnessed the first growth acceleration in the economy. A second acceleration ran from 2002 to 2010. The fourth and final episode started with the slowdown in 2010 and continues to this day. The book provides a theoretical framework that focuses on rent-structures, institutions and the polity, and demonstrates how changes in these can explain the four growth episodes. Kar and Sen argue that the transitions from one growth episode to another can be explained by the bi-directional relationship between growth outcomes and institutional arrangements, and by the manner in which institutional arrangements and their transitions are determined by the political bargains struck between the elite groups in Indian society.

  • Book cover of Saving, Investment, and Growth in India

    This Work Examines Economic Policies Prevailing In India Since Independence. The Determinants, Trends, And Patterns Of Investment And Saving In India And The Role Of Policies In Mediating The Relationship Between Investment And Growth Rates Are Analyzed.

  • Book cover of International Competitiveness, Investment and Finance

    The three authors have been working on this topic for several years and bring considerable expertise to the book What determines international competitiveness is of great interest and relevance to policy makers and academics India is a particularly relevant case study for international competitiveness theories The book is concise and well written

  • Book cover of The Process of Financial Liberalization in India

    This book analyzes the process of financial liberalization in India in the post-1991 period. The authors detail the key changes in each segment and market, and hypothesize possible paths that different constituents of the financial sector may take in the future.

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    This paper discusses the 'developer's dilemma' - a tension emerging from the fact that developing countries are simultaneously seeking structural transformation and broad-based growth to raise incomes of the poor. Simon Kuznets originally hypothesized that structural transformation may have a tendency - in the absence of policy intervention - to put upward pressure on income inequality. However, broad-based economic growth requires steady or even falling income inequality to maximize the growth of incomes at the lower end of the distribution. The purpose of our paper is: (i) to revisit the seminal Kuznets paper in order to understand how Kuznets understood the structural transformation and income inequality relationship precisely; (ii) to discuss the empirical experience of the developing world in terms of structural transformation and, in doing so, to outline a typology of 'varieties' of structural transformation; and (iii) to discuss the structural transformation-inequality relationship and how it may differ under different patterns of structural transformation.