Decentralization and the Social Economics of Development-Lessons from Kenya (CABI 2007)

Editors - C.B. Barrett, A.G. Mude, and J.M. Omiti

There has been broad agreement in recent years that decentralization is desirable in achieving democracy and development at the local level. Examining the successes, failures, possibilities and limitations of efforts across rural Kenya, this book analyses the socioeconomic and institutional prerequisites for successful decentralization. Emphasis is also placed on the role of community groups and producer organizations in reducing poverty and promoting empowerment in local communities.
Original empirical studies explore the fundamental elements of coherent and inclusive decentralization, and how these can be applied to efforts across the African continent and beyond. This text will be invaluable to researchers and students in social sciences and development studies, and to policy makers in international aid agencies, non-governmental development organizations and government ministries.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Contributors

Table of Contents

Development Economics: Critical Concepts in Development Studies (Routledge 2007)

Editor - Christopher Barrett

With its focus on understanding how resource allocation, human behavior, institutional arrangements and private and public policy jointly influence the evolution of the human condition, development economics is arguably the most fundamental field within the discipline of economics. As the opening sentence of T.W. Schultz’s 1979 Nobel Prize lecture declared, “Most of the people in the world are poor, so if we knew the economics of being poor, we would know much of the economics that really matters.”

 

Development economics research ultimately explores why some countries, communities and people are rich and others poor. Rapid economic growth is, in historical terms, a recent phenomenon confined to the past three hundred years for less than one-quarter of the world’s population. Growing and seemingly persistent gaps in prosperity between rich and poor peoples – within and between countries – contributes to sociopolitical tensions, affects patterns of human pressure on the natural environment, and generally touches all facets of human existence. Understanding the process of economic development is thus central to most research in economics and the social sciences more broadly. Development economics nonetheless emerged as a distinct field of analytical, empirical and institutional research only in the past half century or so, with especially rapid progress in the past generation.

 

Edited by a well-established scholar who has published broadly in the field, this four volume collection provides a thorough review of the evolution and current state of the art of the field of development economics, covering development microeconomics, meso-level institutional phenomena associated with communities and markets, as well as development macroeconomics, in each case integrating theoretical and empirical research. The papers chosen for inclusion have been selected for their clarity and complementarity to the rest of the collection, as well as for their impact on thinking within the field. An extensive introductory essay summarizes the state of the field and the history of thought in development economics for those new to the area and explains the importance of the articles selected. The collection will interest academic researchers, policy practitioners and students alike.

 

The four volumes are each approximately 400 pages in length; their organization can be seen in the Table of Contents provided.

Introductory Chapter

Table of Contents

Book Description

Understanding and Reducing Persistent Poverty in Africa (Routledge, 2007)

Editors - Christopher Barrett, Peter Little, Michael Carter

Prior work has shown that there is a significant amount of turnover amongst the poor as households exit and enter poverty. Some of this mobility can be attributed to regular movement back and forth in response to exogenous variability in climate, prices, health, etc. (“churning”). Other crossings of the poverty line reflect permanent shifts in long-term well-being associated with gains or losses of productive assets or permanent changes in asset productivity due, for example, to adoption of improved technologies or access to new, higher-value markets. Distinguishing true structural mobility from simple churning is important because it clarifies the factors that facilitate such important structural change. Conversely, it also helps identify the constraints that may leave other households caught in a trap of persistent, structural poverty. The papers in this book help to distinguish the types of poverty and to deepen understanding of the structural features and constraints that create poverty traps. Such an understanding allows communities, local governments and donors to take proactive, effective steps to combat persistent poverty in Africa.

This book was previously published as a special issue of the Journal of Development Studies.

The Social Economics of Poverty: Identities, Groups, Communities and Networks (Routledge, 2005)

This project originates from The Pew Charitable Trusts' project on Moral and Social Dimensions of Microeconomic Behavior in Low-Income Communities. 

In The Social Economics of Poverty, an eminent team of scholars apply tools of the nascent social economics paradigm to one of the most enduring and frustrating questions in economics: why does poverty persist in a world of abundant resources?  Why are some people excluded from growth processes while others are not?  Why do some people enjoy access to scarce resources or the efficiency enhancements associated with cooperation while others do not?

 

Humans do not live in isolation.  Observed microeconomic behavior therefore depends on people’s identities and on the formal and informal social relations that shape their world.  These behaviors subsequently affect individual and group identity and relationships, creating a system with dynamic feedback.  Such systems commonly lead to low-level, stable states characteristic of poverty traps.  Economists are just beginning to explore the consequences of such phenomena.Individual chapters, written by leading scholars in the field, illustrate how the insights offered by social economics might inform and enhance both the discipline of economics and the design of policies intended to help reduce the incidence and duration of poverty around the world.

 

Contributors include George Akerlof, Larry Blume, Sam Bowles, Michael Carter, Marco Castillo, Tim Conley, Indraneel Dasgupta, Jean-Yves Duclos, Joan Esteban, Marcel Fafchamps, Hanming Fang, Andrew Foster, Tatiana Goetghebuer, Karla Hoff, Ravi Kanbur, Rachel Kranton, Eliana LaFerrara, Glenn Loury, Jean-Philippe Platteau, Debraj Ray, Arijit Sen and Chris Udry.

Table of Contents


Sales Discount Flyer from Routledge

 

Food Aid After Fifty Years: Recasting Its Role (Routledge, 2005)

with Daniel G. Maxwell.

Food aid has improved or saved the lives of many hundreds of millions of people worldwide in the half century since U.S. Public Law 480 was passed in 1954. 

 

This book provides the most comprehensive, current and clear explanation of the wide range of issues surrounding food aid, an extraordinaily complex arena of contemporary international policy.  In donor countries, food aid is at once an instrument of domestic agricultural policy, development assistance, and foreign and trade policies, managed through both bilateral and multilateral agencies with heavy involvement from the private non-profit sector as well as profit-seeking agribusinesses and maritime interests.  In recipient countries, food aid affects agriculture, finance, markets, human health and nutrition, and the general path of economic development. Widespread misunderstanding and myths feed ongoing controversy over food aid and undermine food aid’s significant potential as an instrument of humanitarian and development policy. 

 

By integrating the findings and experience of an academic economist and a senior manager and food security advisor with a major international NGO on the role food aid plays, and might prospectively play in the future, this book advances an evidence-based vision for food aid in support of a broader strategy to reduce poverty and food insecurity in low-income, food deficit nations.  The authors first present a clear and comprehensive analytical and empirical account of food aid as historically and currently practiced so as to resolve key misunderstandings and explode a few longstanding myths.  Food aid has been a flawed instrument over the past half century, to be sure.  But with limited substitute resources available globally from donors to support humanitarian operations and development assistance, it has nonetheless played an important role.  Moreover, many of food aid’s flaws are remediable with concerted action by key donors and operational agencies.

Table of Contents

Sales Discount Flyer from Routledge

The CGIAR at 31:An Independent Meta-Evaluation of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (The World Bank, 2004)

Uma Lele, Christopher B. Barrett, Carl K. Eicher, Bruce Gardner, Christopher Gerrard, Lauren Kelly, William Lesser, Karin Perkins, Saeed Rana, Mandivamba Rukuni and David J. Spielman

Main Report

Natural Resources Management Research in the CGIAR: A Meta-Evaluation by Christopher B. Barrett

Other thematic and country working papers

Natural Resources Management in African Agriculture: Understanding and Improving Current Practices (CABI Publishing, 2002)

with Frank Place (International Center for Research on Agroforestry), Abdillahi Aboud (Egerton University, Kenya).


Full description and more details about the book (CABI Publishing website)

Read this book online (PDF format on CABI Website)

Tradeoffs or Synergies? Agricultural Intensification, Economic Development and the Environment in Developing Countries (CABI Publishing, 2000).

with David Lee on the relationship between agricultural intensification, poverty reduction, economic growth and the environment.


Full description and more details about the book (CABI Publishing website)

Read this book online (PDF format on CABI Website)

Overseas Research: A Practical Guide (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).

with Jeff Cason (Middlebury College) on the mechanics of conducting field research in low- and middle-income countries.


Full description and more details about the book (JHUP website)

*Out of print: second edition in preparation*