- Title
- Introduction: The Routledge Handbook of Global Development
- Creator
- Sims, Kearrin; Banks, Nicola; Engel, Susan; Hodge, Paul; Makuwira, Jonathan; Nakamura, Naohiro; Rigg, Jonathan; Salamanca, Albert; Yeophantong, Pichamon
- Relation
- The Routledge Handbook of Global Development p. 1-11
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9781003017653-1
- Publisher
- Routledge
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2022
- Description
- Following the emergence of ‘development’ as a global project some 75 years ago, many parts of the world have seen notable improvements in living standards. Poverty rates have declined, life expectancy has increased, formalized education has expanded, and new infrastructures have provided greater access to water, electricity and other social services. Yet alongside such ‘good change’ (Chambers 2004), the world has also witnessed new and enduring challenges, including rising socio economic inequality, unsustainable resource depletion, new conflicts, democratic backsliding, and the rapid acceleration of anthropogenic climate change. Where parts of Asia have experienced exceptional economic growth and strong improvements in human development, in other regions such progress has been halting. Inequities and inequalities related to gender, race, ethnicity, place, religion, and other social categories remain pervasive, as do global health threats, more frequent and intense disasters, and a myriad of other challenges (UN 2015). The above paragraph provides an unremarkable summary of where the globe is now in terms of ‘development’: the evidence is mixed, contested and geographically variegated. This, though, is also the nub of the matter. In 2019, Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo won the Nobel Prize in Economics (along with Michael Kremer) for their ‘experimental approach to alleviating global poverty.’ In Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty, they write: Economists (and other experts) seem to have very little useful to say about why some countries grow and others do not. Basket cases, such as Bangladesh or Cambodia, turn into small miracles. Poster children, such as Côte D’Ivoire, fall into the ‘bottom billion.’ In retrospect, it is always possible to construct a rationale for what happened in each place. But the truth is, we are largely incapable of predicting where growth will happen, and we don’t understand very well why things fire up. (Banerjee and Duflo 2011, 267)
- Subject
- global development; living standards; anthropogenic climate change; global health threats
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1475822
- Identifier
- uon:49663
- Identifier
- ISBN:9781003017653
- Language
- eng
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