Todaro, 2020) All Chapters 1-15 Covered| 100%
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, Chapter 1: Introducing Economic Development: A Global Perspective
Key Concepts
As curious as students who register to take Development Economics may be, their knowledge and
experience of the developing world will vary widely. The first main point of Chapter 1 is to emphasise
how different life in the developing world is. New in the 13th edition is a systematic description of four
stylised strata of living standards from extreme poverty to rich based on Rosling,
Rosling, and Rosling Ronnlund‘s book Factfulness. This is followed by a discussion of the World Bank‘s
classification of economies by ranges of average national income using gross national in come (GNI)
statistics.
The second point is to provide an overview of the nature of development economics as a field. A
defense of development economics as a distinct field, rather than an agglomeration of other economics
subfields, is offered. A major theme of the book, that development economics must encompass the
study of institutional and social, as well as economic, mechanisms for modernising an economy while
eliminating absolute poverty, is introduced.
Sections 1.5 and 1.6 looks deeper into the meaning of development and a view of development that is
multidimensional. Amartya Sen‘s ―Capabilities‖ approach is discussed in Section 1.5. In Section 1.6, data
collected in a Gallup World Poll on the relationship between happiness (as measured by Gallup‘s
life satisfaction ―ladder‖ question and real per capita income) and other research on happiness/life
satisfaction is discussed. The level of happiness is not only related to level of income but to other
factors such as democratic freedoms and the quality of social relationships. The role of normative
values in development economics—a subject dealing with human misery and human potential, with
equity as well as efficiency, with cultural change that causes losses as well as gains, and with transfer
as well as creation of wealth—is also stressed.
The conclusion is that development is both a physical reality and a state of mind. The meaning and
objectives of development include the provision of basic needs, reducing inequality, raising living
standards through appropriate economic growth, improving self-esteem in relation to the developed
countries, and expanding freedom of choice in the market and beyond.
Section 1.7 presents an in depth examination of the UN‘s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
This includes a more comprehensive list of the goals themselves (appearing in Table 1.1) and a
discussion of the shortcomings of the SDGs. In Section 1.8, the plan of the book is introduced
through 32 critical questions of development economics. Depending on the amount of material
covered by the instructor, students should be able to intelligently address most of these questions by the
end of the course. Finally, a comparative case study of Pakistan and Bangladesh is presented.
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,Lecture Suggestions
It might be best to begin with a discussion of the immense scale of transformation in the world
economy. The late Hans Rosling‘s video ―200 countries, 200 years, 4 minutes‖ (readily available on
YouTube) can be used to confirm this point in an entertaining way. It might also be helpful to highlight
that real gross world product per capita has almost tripled between 1960 and 2018 (implying growth
per year of 1.85%) and is 33% higher than it was at the turn of this century
(implying annual growth of 1.56% from 2000 to 2018). This data can be found on the Saint Louis
Federal
Reserve‘s website in the Federal Reserve Economic Database (or FRED).
Despite
such advances, tremendous disparities continue to exist. In terms of easily accessible statistics the
PEW Research Centre‘s ―World Population by Income‖ provides an interactive map
showing the share of economies‘ population who are economically poor, low income, middle income,
upper middle income, and high income. While regrettably the data provided is for 2011, it
echoes what Todaro and Smith point out in the text, that more than 75% of the world‘s population live on
$15 or less a day (or about $5,500 per person per year). Several excellent books attempt to give
some idea of the range of living standards found throughout the world. For example, The Material
World by Peter Menzell. This book presents photographic profiles of typical families
around the world with all of their possessions placed in front of their homes. As one goes from one
family to the next the instructor has the opportunity to highlight the important differences between
nations and regions and to touch on key issues of growth and development.
One of the key strengths of this chapter is that it does not focus solely on the hard numbers that
supposedly measure development. The discussion of Sen‘s Capabilities approach and the far less than
perfect relationship between income and happiness are well worth spending a fair amount of class time
exploring. Class time should also be spent discussing the 32 critical questions listed on
pages 21–23 of the text and then asking students to identify 3 or 4 questions that they are
particularly interested in exploring. Asking each student to list what they consider to be ―critically‖
critical questions on a sheet of paper, collecting their responses, and then trying to direct the rest of
the term to addressing the most commonly mentioned critical questions for that class will be helpful
in further drawing students in and holding their attention throughout the term.
At this same point, the instructor might also wish to get some idea of students‘ experiences traveling
to developing countries and, in as subtle a way as is possible, determine how shaky their understanding
of the wider world is. The instructor perhaps could draw on his or her own experiences and give
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, some background as to how he or she first became interested in Development
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