Search results for ""author john toye""

This book questions what enduring lessons have been learnt about the interdependence of international trade and economic development during the last 50 years. Since the end of the Cold War and the advent of the WTO, developing countries have been forced to face the choice of whether, and to what extent, to integrate economically with the rest of the world. The key issue of international political economy is emphasized.The authors argue that while integration through trade has become increasingly necessary for successful development, it rapidly encounters a series of problems that remain to be resolved. These range from increasing inequality and instability, the vagaries of WTO rules, persistent agricultural protection in developed countries, through to inadequate finance and new waves of technological innovation. Underlying all these concerns, however, is the deeper question of how much the developing countries can influence the setting of the rules of the international system.Trade and Development examines all the major topics in the area of trade and development, along with proposals for new directions for UNCTAD. The book will be of great interest to academics, researchers, NGOs and policymakers involved in international and development economics.

Read more less

Development is not a purely economic phenomenon; it also has a strong sociological element. The Many Faces of Socioeconomic Change explores how economic socio-cultural and political aspects of human progress have been studied since the time of Adam Smith. Surveying narratives of how development occurs, from early evolutionary models to recent types of development theory, it outlines the main long-term changes in how socioeconomic development has been envisaged through time. The Many Faces of Socioeconomic Change presents the argument that socioeconomic development emerged with the creation of grand evolutionary sequences of social progress that were the products of Enlightenment and mid-Victorian thinkers. By the middle of the twentieth century, when interest in accelerating development gave the topic a new impetus its scope narrowed to a set of economically based strategies. After 1960, however, faith in such strategies began to wane, in the face of indifferent results and a general faltering of confidence in economists' boasts of scientific expertise. In the twenty first century, development research is being pursued using research methods that generate disconnected results. As a result, it seems unlikely that any grand narrative will be created in the future and that Neo-liberalism will be the last of this particular kind of socioeconomic theory. With a broad scope of content and clear exposition of academic thinking this book guides the reader through the way in which the policy adopted as a consequence of modern theories has been less effective because of the neglect or a misunderstanding of the social context within which they operate.

Read more less

Written by a multi-disciplinary team of contributors, this collection explores the different dimensions of well being, poverty and inequality. A person’s sense of well being is compounded of many elements including economic, political and social psychology. Poverty and inequality are aspects of a lack of well being in multiple dimensions and, this texts argues, development should be considered a process that overcomes these multiple deficienciesThis book examines the advantages of analysing poverty and development by multi-discipline research. Economists, political sociologists and anthropologists put forward an idea of well being from their own perspective, using their own research material, while the editors argue in their introduction that bringing to bear of many disciplines can enrich the research output of all.

Read more less

Against the backdrop of a 20-year revolt against free trade orthodoxy by economists inside the UN and their impact on policy discussions since the 1960s, the authors show how the UN both nurtured and inhibited creative and novel intellectual contributions to the trade and development debate. Presenting a stirring account of the main UN actors in this debate, The UN and Global Political Economy focuses on the accomplishments and struggles of UN economists and the role played by such UN agencies as the Department of Economic (and Social) Affairs, the United Nations Commission on Trade and Development, and the Economic Commission for Latin America (and the Caribbean). It also looks closely at the effects of the Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s, the growing strength of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in the 1990s, and the lessons to be drawn from these and other recent developments.

Read more less