Popular Development Economics—An Anthropologist among the Mandarins
نویسنده
چکیده
I n 1997, I found myself newly arrived at Oxford University. I was taking a detour from my path to do research in West Africa thanks to a fellowship that funded a year of ancillary training before my fieldwork. Though studying anthropology, I was at St. Antony’s College, where Paul Collier’s Center for the Study of African Economies is located, and was in the same entering cohort as Collier’s now-famous student Dambisa Moyo (assuming I would not be able to remember her first name, she offered, “it sounds kind of like ‘pizza’”). During my first week there, I was talking with three graduate students in development economics and asked them whether the 1997 Asian economic crisis had caused development economists to question any of their models. Yes, they assured me, the crisis had left them and the field more generally rather shaken and ready to entertain all kinds of new ideas about how economies work. I found that interesting and, telling them that I worked in Africa, asked whether the failure of African economies to conform to most economic models caused them similar consternation. All three replied simultaneously with a derisive snort and chuckles, followed by assurances that no, Africa’s failure to develop was not challenging economic theory then or any time soon. I assume these were not students of Paul Collier, an economist who has dedicated his career to understanding how African economies do work. But the vignette is perhaps instructive inasmuch as it gives a sense of how economists, even development economists, tend to view Africa. Where Africa and economic theory fail to coincide, the fault lies squarely with Africa, not with economic theory. In his books The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done about It and Wars, Guns, andVotes: Democracy in Dangerous Places (cited henceforth as BB and WGV, respectively), Collier attempts to bring African and other poor countries with problems of “stuck” development back into the conversation of economists, policymakers, and an educated nonspecialist readership. Book cover testimonials from The Economist, Larry Summers, Larry Diamond, and New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof give a sense of the readership Collier has targeted. Using analysis based on econometric studies he has conducted with his research colleagues at Oxford and the World Bank, he first tries to make sense of the world’s “basket cases,” and then to propose policy interventions that may help them to set themselves right. Collier’s argument starts from the finding that the bottom billion have stagnated over the past forty to fifty years while the other four billion people living in the “developing world” have not only achieved economic development but, in most cases, a greater degree of political stability. He identifies four “traps” that reinforce economic stasis, political instability, and each other. They are conflict, reliance on natural resources, being landlocked with bad neighbors, and bad governance. Having laid out these structural challenges, Collier uses the second half of The Bottom Billion to outline some possible solutions, including judicious use of development aid, postconflict international peacekeeping missions, revised international laws that would diminish the complicity of richer governments and their businesses in bad governance and conflict, and revising trade policy in a way that actively favors the poorest countries. In Wars, Guns, and Votes, Collier goes further, elaborating his theory of how electoral democracy feeds instability, especially in a context where countries are “too diverse for cooperation to produce public goods” (BB: p. 9), guns are easily available, looting easy, and a past history of coups has weakened democratic culture and emboldened the military. In this book, his proposed solution is more activist: Mike McGovern is assistant professor of anthropology at Yale University. | | !
منابع مشابه
Taste and aroma of fresh and stored mandarins.
During the last decade there has been a continuous rise in consumption of fresh easy-to-peel mandarins. However, mandarins are much more perishable than other citrus fruit, mainly due to rapid deterioration in sensory acceptability after harvest. In the current review we discuss the biochemical components involved in forming the unique flavor of mandarins, and how postharvest storage operations...
متن کاملThe Effect of Mandarins (Citrus spp.) Scions on Peel Components and Juice Quality
The effects of mandarin scions on peel components and juice quality parameters were investigated in this study. Peel flavor components were extracted by using cold-press and eluted by using n-hexane. Then all analyzed by GC-FID and GC-MS. Total soluble solids, total acids, pH value, ascorbic acid as well as density and ash were determined in juice obtained from mandarin scions. Twenty-seven, Tw...
متن کاملNetworking and Corruption
Networking has become an important aspect of modern life in recent years either in sciences or interpersonal relations. Networks are studied as new forms of social organization in the sociology of science and technology, in the economics of network industries and network technologies, in business administration and in public policy. In the context of social sciences, scientists have recognized ...
متن کاملDemocracy and Environment Quality in Selected Countries: An Application of Panel Data
T his study investigates the relationship between quality of environment and democracy among different countries over the period of 2002 - 2012. Democracy and accumulated democracy indices have been considered as political inequality variables influencing the quality of the environment among different countries in the reduced form of Kuznets’ environmental curve (EKC) hypotheses mode...
متن کاملMarkets, Mandarins, and Mathematicians
I would like tobegin on a personal note, in part to expiatepast sins of omission, partly to allow me to illustrate a major theme of this paper. Though I began the study of economics at Oxford in 1960, to my shame the sole work of Peter Bauer’s that I had read until fairly recently was Indian Economic Policy and Development (1961). Leafing through my copy of Bauer’s book to prepare this paper, I...
متن کاملThe nexus of renewable energy - sustainable development - environmental quality in Iran: Bayesian VAR approach
The use of renewable energy reduces environmental pollution and leads to achievement of sustainable development. The current study investigates the dynamic interrelationship between sustainable development, renewable and non-renewable energies and environment nexus by applying Bayesian vector autoregression (BVAR) and impulse response functions in Iran with an annual data frequency for the time...
متن کامل