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Does culture matter? This question has taken on added significance since fundamentalist revivalism has recently gained ground in different parts of the world. The old controversy between Max Weber and Karl Marx, which centres around the extent to which cultural factors such as social norms and values affect economic growth is of critical importance, particularly because of its policy implications. Indeed, if culture is not an autonomous factor susceptible to influencing economic realities, it should not matter and public authorities can dispense with thinking about cultural interventions. On the other hand, if culture does have a real impact, the question arises as to whether it is conducive...
This book provides a detailed description and analysis of: the characteristics and functioning of informal sector firms; the causes of the pervasiveness of these firms; the relations between formal and informal firms; the consequences of informality for economic development; and appropriate policy responses.
Informal institutions — family and kinship structures, traditions, and social norms — are often decisive factors in shaping policy outcomes and this book advocates a pragmatic way of dealing with them.
This book offers an innovative examination of how ‘low–technology’ industries operate. Based on extensive fieldwork in India, the book fuses economic and sociological perspectives on information sharing by means of informal interaction in a low-technology cluster in a developing country. In doing so, the book sheds new light on settings where economic relations arise as emergent properties of social relations. This book examines industrial innovation and microeconomic network behaviour among producers and clusters, perceiving knowledge diffusion to be a socially-spatial, as much as a geographically spatial, phenomenon. This is achieved by employing two methods – simulation modelling,...
Financial inclusion through microfinance has become a powerful force in improving the living conditions of poor farmers, rural non-farm enterprises and other vulnerable groups. In its unique ability to link the existing extensive network of India’s rural bank branches with the Self Help Groups (SHG), the National Bank of Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD) has covered up to 97 million poor households by March 2010 under its Self Help Group Bank Linkage Programme. Policy-makers have proclaimed SHGs as ‘‘the most potent initiative ... for delivering financial services to the poor in a sustainable manner." This book presents a comprehensive scientific assessment of the impact of th...
The key challenge for achieving sustained development in developing countries relates to quality of domestic governance, which in turn is strongly affected by external interventions. Domestic governance includes politics, policy formulation, institution building and policy implementation. It is important for both international and domestic agents to understand how the interplay between external interventions and domestic governance affects social and economic outcomes. This volume presents a series of studies analysing the links between external interventions and domestic governance in the areas of economic, social and security policy. Key questions that are addressed here include: How do ex...
The world economy is currently in the throes of a global economic crisis reminiscent of the great depressions of the 1930s and the 1870s. As back then, the crisis has exposed the major structural imbalances in financial and credit markets in addition to global trade forcing many governments, developed and developing, to impose debilitating austerity measures that are exacerbating the structural weaknesses that caused the crisis in the first place. This volume offers historical insights into the origins of the contemporary crisis as well as detailed analyses of the financial and trade dimensions, an assessment of the technological and innovation context along with perspectives on the implications for unemployment and gender imbalances.
The 2008 global financial crisis took the world by surprise, not least because politicians, businessmen and economists believed that they had learned crucial lessons from the Great Depression of the 1930s. As a direct result of deregulated financial markets, financial crises occurred in both developed and developing economies. However, this volume argues that in the most recent crisis developing countries suffered less, and that financial policy and regulation played a crucial part in this. The contributors to this volume explore the alternative development paradigm that has been gaining credence since the Asian crisis, known as new developmentalism. New developmentalism is embodied in the f...
In the wake of Katrina and Haiti, it is evident that disaster response, economic policy and development are intrinsically linked; this book is a welcome intervention. Albala-Bertrand is a renowned expert in the area of disasters and development; this book is the long awaited follow up to his 1993 book with Clarendon Press.
This book provides compelling evidence from 42 Sub-Saharan African countries that gender gaps in legal capacity and property rights need to be addressed in terms of substance, enforcement, awareness, and access if economic opportunities for women in Sub-Saharan Africa are to continue to expand.