Limiting Resources: Market-Led Reform and the Transformation of Public Goods (original) (raw)
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Orthodox economists argue, in this country as elsewhere in the developed world, that many of the issues of environmental damage and resource use over which governments, corporations and community groups tussle could be resolved i f appropriate markets for environmental goods were established. This paper argues that markets are commonly not appropriate mechanisms to resolve environmental disputes: much of the problem is to determine the effects rather than to allocate them; when the rate of discount of the future is positive, the social need is different from the sum of rational individual decisions; and markets ignore equity. Furthermore, the limits on sustainability seem to be quantitative rather than qualitativeto rest on the magnitude of resource discovery, or on the rate of improvement of environmental quality per dollar invested for example. Again, the central question concerns the data rather than a means of allocating costs and benefits. These dificulties in using market mechanisms imply that legal systems may be preferable as means of regulating environmental use. The treatment of the environment by people in advanced capitalist countries has raised fears about the sustainability of the way of life of capitalist societies. In the minds of some commentators policies to remedy our misuse of environments seem even to rank above policies to promote social justice and welfare. While the left in this country and in other English speaking countries has been divided by the apparent
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Development microeconomics/Pranab Bardhan and Christopher Udry. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Microeconomics. 2. Economic development. I. Udry, Christopher. II. Title. HB172.B26 1999 338.5-dc21 99-20554 ISBN 0-19-877370-6 (hbk) ISBN 0-19-877371-4 (pbk) capturing the complexities of that real world.) In many chapters we briefly describe what we think are some of the major theoretical issues on a given problem, and then use a model or two to illustrate ways of deeper analytical probing, so that the student-readers get some experience of building models which they can then use to analyse other important problems in development. (We have presumed some familiarity with the tools and concepts of general microeconomic theory at the first-year graduate or the advanced undergraduate level.) Lord Wavell entitled a book of poems Other Men's Flowers. In writing this textbook, we have essentially collected other men's and women's 'flowers', having freely borrowed their ideas and models; only the selection and the flower arrangement is ours. We express our general gratitude to all these authors (we attempt to refer to them individually in the chapters) for enriching the field of development economics and also to our respective students at Berkeley and Northwestern, the first visitors to our 'flower show', for encouraging us in this venture.
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Journal of International Development, 2013
This is a collection of essays by the former chief economist of the World Bank Justin Yifu Lin (along with his collaborators) on what he labels as 'New Structural Economics' (NSE). To readers who are not familiar with NSE, Lin informs us that it represents a new wave of development thinking, which has been proposed by him (as well as a few others). NSE, according to Lin, is an approach to the determinants and dynamics of economic structure. The broad argument of NSE can be summarised as follows: • The economic structure of an economy is determined by its factor endowments. • Economic development is driven by changes in factor endowments and technological improvements. • The most efficient way to upgrade a country's factor endowments is to follow its comparative advantage to determine its industrial structure; the country can exploit its comparative advantage by emphasising industries that exploit the relative abundant factors of production. • In technology, developing countries should either borrow or adopt technology that is available in advanced countries. These propositions beg the question, what is new or structural about the previous arguments? Lin provides an explanation of this in the first chapter, laying the background of the NSE approach. According to Lin, development thinking has gone through three distinct waves. The first wave, which is associated with the postwar writings of Arthur Lewis, Albert Hirschman, Gunnar Myrdal, Ragnar Nurkse and Paul Rosenstein-Rodan, among others, represents the (old) structural approach to economic development. The salient feature of this approach is that it highlights the structure of the economy as the source of underdevelopment; it underscores various market failures and rigidities and emphasises the role of the government to correct those failures and rigidities. The second wave is the neoclassical approach, which focuses upon the role of economic incentives, highlights the failures of government interventions and advocates an astructural market-based approach to economic development. This approach is epitomised by the Washington consensus of reforms that is promoted by international development agencies, led by the Washington-based international finance institutions. It is well known that the impact of such policies, which are context-contingent, has been at best mixed. Against this background, Lin advances the NSE approach to development. The common element between the old and the new structural economics is that they both emphasise the structural aspect of the economy and share the belief that developing countries are qualitatively different from developed countries. Both acknowledge an activist role for the government to facilitate a structural transformation from a backward to a modern economy. What differentiates the old from the NSE is at least twofold. First, the old approach emphasises a whole variety of market rigidities and failures, whereas the NSE seems to focus predominantly on the notion of factor-endowment difference. Second, they also seem to differ in terms of the emphasis accorded to market incentives. The old structural approach envisioned an active and robust role for the government in correcting those market failures. According to Lin, the NSE approach seeks to marry the neoclassical role of the market with the structural features of the economy. It would advocate a strategy of development that accords a central role to the market in determining its comparative advantage: it calls for upgrading the industrial structure by promoting industries that make intensive use of the factors of production that are relatively abundant.