Development Economics Quotes

The dominant orthodoxy in development economics was that Third World countries were trapped in a vicious cycle of poverty that could be broken only by massive foreign aid from the more prosperous industrial nations of the world. This was in keeping with a more general vision on the Left that people were essentially divided into three categories - the heartless, the helpless, and wonderful people like themselves, who would rescue the helpless by playing Lady Bountiful with the taxpayers' money.

China adopted a capitalist system in the 1980s, and they went from a 60% poverty rate to 10%.

The First World became a popular phrase in about the 1970s and '80s. The World Bank then began categorizing countries in different categories, advanced to the least developed.

I began my work in the '70s, teaching at a university in Bangladesh, and these economic theories that I had learned stopped ringing true for me, as I saw the misery of people living all around me.

Development does not take place in Washington, DC. Development takes place in the rest of the world.

One of the many economic differences between developed and developing countries is that developed countries subsidize farmers while developing countries tax farmers.

The failure of credit markets is one of the major reasons for underdevelopment.

The Indian economy grew at 5.5 percent, but if you look at the last 30 years - for example, 1960 to 1985 - the progress made by East Asian countries was phenomenal. In a single generation they had been able to transform the character of their economy. They were able to get rid of chronic poverty.

My definition of economic development is economic growth.

Global poverty is falling faster today than at any time in human history.

To say that the whole of the industrial experience of Europe and America just shows the rewards of exploiting the Third World is a gross simplification.

Peter Montiel has long set the highest standard for lucid textbooks on the macroeconomics of developing countries. Now in this new edition of his superb classic Macroeconomics in Emerging Markets, he has surpassed even himself. He uniquely fills the gap between rich-country-obsessed macro- and micro-obsessed developing-country analysis. No student of the macroeconomics of development will henceforward be able to do without this book.

Economic development and poverty alleviation are so complicated that I don't think there's a single background or a single discipline that is sufficient to tackle these great human problems.

We will not overcome world poverty unless we manage climate change successfully. I've spent my life as a development economist, and it's crystal clear that we succeed or fail on winning the battle against world poverty and managing climate change together. If we fail on one, we fail on the other.

I have dedicated many years to economic study, up to the Ph.D. level, to analyze and understand the inherent weaknesses of aid and why aid policies have consistently failed to deliver on economic growth and poverty alleviation.

My dad is an economist who does global development research. What he practices is a kind of quantifiable empathy: trying to empathize with systems rather than people.

When I was a graduate student, I actually took a course in development economics and I thought it was the most boring thing in the world.

It became clear I wanted to be a development economist. I mean, I said I wanted to work on the economics of poor countries. And I'd actually say that I don't think that was so much about narrowing the gap as about increasing their incomes, which means economic growth, which is really my prime interest.