Economic Development As An Adaptive Process

This book explains how changing technology and economizing behaviour induce vast changes in productivity, resource allocation, labour utilization, and patterns of living. Economic growth is seen as a process by which businesses, regimes, countries, and the whole world pass through distinct epochs, each one emerging from its predecessor, each one creating the conditions for its successor. Viewed from a long-run perspective, growth must be characterized as an explosive process, marked by turbulent transitions in social and political life as societies adapt to new opportunities, the demise of old ways of living, and to the vast increase and redistribution of human populations. The book is based on a synthesis of classical economics and contemporary concepts of adaptation and economic evolution. Although it is based on analytical methods, the text has been stripped of all equations and with few exceptions is devoid of technical jargon.

This book explores the relationship between economic adaptation and long-run development, with particluar emphasis on small, low- income economies. It also examines what makes for flexibility within an economy and how policy can affect an economy's ability to adapt to conditions over which it has no control. The premise is that all economies need to adapt to changing circumstances in order to achieve a reasonable pace of development. The author explains the forces to which economies need to respond, the attributes that increase an economy's capacity to adjust, the difficulties of adjustment, and what policy can do to facilitate adjustment. The author illustrates structure and flexibility within an economy and offers a guide to forming policy. Specific policy options are examined, among them using exchange rate fluctuations. The roles of government and markets in setting adjustment policies for industry, agriculture, and finance are explored. The study draws upon a wide range of material and avoids a narrowly economic point of view. The book is intended for use by economists working for or advising government agencies and for teachers and students of development economics. It includes an extensive reference list.

Agricultural development and adaptive economic theory; The Punjab simulation model; Tracking the green revolution; Recent developments and policy perspectives.

The complexity of the development process calls for an adaptive approach for assistance programmes which rely on strategic planning, responsiveness and experimentation and decision-making processes that join learning with action

A growing concern with more general approaches to prediction and planning; Evolution and learning systems; Social learning as evolutionary experimentation; The emerging social science paradigm.

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.