Diverse Development Paths and Structural Transformation in the Escape from Poverty

This volume analyzes the experiences of developing countries in Asia, Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa and examines how they might catch up.

Based on growth performance across the developing world over the last five decades, it offers a thorough account of the possibilities to engage in such processes in an increasingly globalized world. Together, the chapters highlight the diversity and variation of development pathways and provide valuable lessons and implications for how to approach this difficult question. The book shows the importance of acknowledging that the process of development is dynamic and that the possibilities for catch up are situation dependent. At the same time it makes clear that without structural change, and in particular agricultural transformation, sustained catch up is unlikely to happen.

The volume demonstrates how analysis of current growth processes in developing countries can be enriched by paying closer attention to the multifaceted nature of both economic backwardness and successful pathways to escape it.

Contents: Part 1: Structural Transformation and Catching Up. 1. Diversity of development paths and structural transformation in historical perspective: an introduction/Martin Andersson and Tobias Axelsson. 2. Structural change and catching up: the relative small country advantage/Lennart Schon. 3. The Latecomer advantages and disadvantages: a new structural economics perspective/Justin Yifu Lin. 4. The role of agriculture in catching up: a Gerschenkronian perspective/C. Peter Timmer. Part 2: Diversity in Development. 5. Misinterpreting the East Asian miracles: A Gerschenkronian perspective on substitution and advantages of backwardness in the industrialization of Eastern Asia/Christer Gunnarsson. 6. Southeast Asia: the half-way miracles?/Anne Booth. 7. Catching Up: now and then: has Latin America changed tracks?/Luis Bertola. 8: Economic backwardness and catching up: Brazilian agriculture, 1964-2014/Lee Alston and Bernardo Mueller. 9. Is Africa too late for ‘late development’? Gerschenkron South of the Sahara/Gareth Austin. 10. Is Sub-Saharan Africa finally catching up?/Erik Thorbecke and Yusi Ouyang. 11. Relative economic backwardness and catching up: lessons from history, implications for development thinking/Martin Andersson and Tobias Axelsson.