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Agricultural Development: New Perspectives in a Changing World is the first comprehensive exploration of key emerging issues facing developing-country agriculture today, from rapid urbanization to rural transformation to climate change. In this four-part volume, top experts offer the latest research in the field of agricultural development. Using new lenses to examine today’s biggest challenges, contributors address topics such as nutrition and health, gender and household decision-making, agrifood value chains, natural resource management, and political economy. The book also covers most developing regions, providing a critical global perspective at a time when many pressing challenges ex...
At present, how to develop industries is a burning issue in Africa, where population growth remains high and economic development has thus far failed to provide sufficient jobs for many, especially young people and women. The creation of productive jobs through industrial development ought to be a central issue in steering economic activity across the continent. The authors of this book, consisting of two development economists and five practitioners, argue that the adoption of Kaizen management practices, which originated in Japan and have become widely used by manufacturers in advanced and emerging economies, is decisively the most effective first step for industrial development in Africa. This open access book discusses what Kaizen management is, why it is applicable to Africa, and why it can provide Africa with a springboard for sustainable economic growth and employment generation.
Transforming Poor Economies expertly proposes effective strategies for the development of agriculture and industry within lower income countries in Africa and Asia using insightful case studies to illustrate key findings. Kei Otsuka focuses on how to achieve the first and second Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), using detailed analysis of how agriculture and industry have developed to eradicate poverty and hunger. Otsuka demonstrates that ultimately success is driven by technological and managerial innovation based on learning from abroad, and investment in human capital so that major decision-makers such as farmers and enterprise managers can facilitate innovation. Otsuka further argues that the use of welfare programs to support the livelihoods of these countries are unlikely to have transformative impacts and that agricultural and industrial development results in proven poverty reduction. Scholars of economics and development will find the book's case studies both invaluable and informative. Practitioners and policymakers in development assistance and planning, particularly in Africa and Asia, will also find this an excellent resource for future planning.
This book attempts to provide an effective strategy for industrial development based on the KAIZEN management training experiments conducted in Ghana, Kenya, Ethiopia, Vietnam, and Tanzania. We focus on micro and small enterprises (MSEs) in industrial clusters, because clusters consisting of MSEs are ubiquitous and have high potential to grow.
This book is open access under a CC BY-NC-ND license. This book addresses the issue of how a country, which was incorporated into the world economy as a periphery, could make a transition to the emerging state, capable of undertaking the task of economic development and industrialization. It offers historical and contemporary case studies of transition, as well as the international background under which such a transition was successfully made (or delayed), by combining the approaches of economic history and development economics. Its aim is to identify relevant historical contexts, that is, the ‘initial conditions’ and internal and external forces which governed the transition. It also ...
This landmark study provides an integrated analysis of China's unexpected economic boom of the past three decades. The authors combine deep China expertise with broad disciplinary knowledge to explain China's remarkable combination of high-speed growth and deeply flawed institutions. Their work exposes the mechanisms underpinning the origin and expansion of China's great boom. Penetrating studies track the rise of Chinese capabilities in manufacturing and in research and development. The editors probe both achievements and weaknesses across many sectors, including China's fiscal, legal, and financial institutions. The book shows how an intricate minuet combining China's political system with sectorial development, globalization, resource transfers across geographic and economic space, and partial system reform delivered an astonishing and unprecedented growth spurt.
International agricultural research is expanding beyond the development of annual crop technologies for individual farms to the development of longer-tern natural resource management techniques for entire landscapes. But technologies of practices with a long lag time between investment and returns are unlikely to be adopted by farmers unless they have secure rights to the underlying resources (property rights). Similarly, technologies that span multiple farms are unlikely to be adopted unless neighbors and groups work together (collective action). But little is know about the way property rights and collective action in developing countries mediate the adoption of technologies by farmers and groups. To address this information gap, this volume brings together international experts in economics, sociology, and natural resource management to examine the links among property rights, collective action, and technological change for a variety of technologies across a rage of community contexts in the developing world.
This work examines the nature of agrarian contracts. Agricultural land tenancy and farm labor are basic institutions binding the life and work of billions of people in the Third World. Issues of efficiency and equity associated with a particular form of contract--such as sharecropping--are not merely of academic interest, but have critical bearing on land tenure reform as well as innovations in credit and marketing institutions in agrarian economies. There have been major controversies surrounding the role of land tenure in agricultural and rural development, with much confusion arising from only partial and separate treatments of land and labor contracts. Through a comprehensive critical survey of existing literature, Hayami and Otsuka present a general theory of agrarian contracts by integrating land and labor contracts. Insights from the scrutiny of agrarian contracts are of relevance to industrial organization and management in developed economies as well as to the study of these fields.