英文版发展经济学 Development Economics By Debraj Ray_精品.pdfVIP

Development Economics By Debraj Ray, New York University March 2007. Prepared for the New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, edited by Lawrence Blume and Steven Durlauf. 1 Introduction What we know as the developing world is approximately the group of countries classified by the World Bank as having “low” and “middle” income. An exact description is unnecessary and not too revealing; suffice it to observe that these countries make up over 5 billion of world population, leaving out the approximately one billion who are part of the “high” income developed world. Together, the low and middle income countries generate approximately 6 trillion (2001) dollars of national income, to be contrasted with the 25 trillion generated by high income countries. An index of income that controls for purchasing power would place these latter numbers far closer together (approximately 20 trillion and 26 trillion, according to the World Development Report (2003)) but the per-capita disparities are large and obvious, and to those encoutering them for the first time, still extraordinary. Development Economics, a subject that studies the economics of the developing world, has made excellent use of economic theory, econometric methods, sociology, anthropology, political science, biology and demography and has burgeoned into one of the liveliest areas of research in all the social sciences. My limited approach in this brief article is one of deliberate selection of a few conceptual points that I consider to be central to our thinking about the subject. The reader interested in a more comprehensive overview is advised to look elsewhere (for example, at Dasgupta (1993), Hoff, Braverman and Stiglitz (1993), Ray (1998), Bardhan and Udry (1999), Mookherjee and Ray (2001), and Sen (1999)). I begin with a traditional framework of development, one