Michael Todaro

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Michael Paul Todaro (born May 14, 1942) is an American economist and a pioneer in the field of development economics.

Contents

Todaro earned a PhD in economics from Yale University in 1968 for a thesis titled The Urban Employment Problem in Less Developed Countries – An Analysis of Demand and Supply. [1] Todaro was Professor of Economics at New York University for eighteen years and Senior Associate at the Population Council for thirty years. He lived and taught in Africa for six years. He appears in Who's Who in Economics and Economists of the Twentieth Century. He is also the author of eight books and more than fifty professional articles. In a special February 2011 centenary edition, the American Economic Review selected Todaro’s article “Migration, Unemployment and Development: A 2-Sector Analysis” (with John Harris) as one of the twenty most important articles published by that journal during the first one hundred years of its existence. [2] He is the co-author of the widely used textbook, Economic Development, 12th Edition, published in 2014. [3]

Awards and Positions

Innovations

Economic Development

Todaro is co-author of Economic Development, [4] the leading text in that field. It begins with Principles and Concepts, offering comprehensive treatments of institutions, comparative development, and traditional and new theories of development. It examines in-depth Development Policymaking and Roles of Market, State, and Civil Society. The text examines the key topics of Poverty and Inequality, Population Growth Causes and Consequences, Urbanization and Rural-Urban Migration; Education and Health in Development; Agricultural Transformation and Rural Development; Environment and Development; International Trade and Development Strategy; Balance of Payments, Debt, Financial Crises, and Stabilization Policies; Foreign Finance, Investment, and Aid; and Finance and Fiscal Policy for Development.

Todaro’s five years of living and teaching in Africa as well as two decades of extensive travel throughout Latin America and Asia, first as a director of the Rockefeller Foundation and then as a professor of economics at New York University helped shape and refine a book that is unique among development texts in approach, organization, and pedagogy. The textbook Economic Development takes a policy-oriented approach, presenting economic theory in the context of critical policy debates and country-specific case studies to show how theory relates to the problems and prospects of developing countries. Among its most significant innovations are the following:

Migration research. Todaro developed the Todaro Migration Model, studied the Todaro Paradox (examining how an urban public sector job creation program could actually lead to an increased number of workers who are unemployed), coauthored the Harris Todaro Model.

Books

Related Research Articles

Economic growth Increase in the inflation-adjusted market value of the goods and services produced by an economy over time

Economic growth can be defined as the increase or improvement in the inflation-adjusted market value of the goods and services produced by an economy over time. Statisticians conventionally measure such growth as the percent rate of increase in the real gross domestic product, or real GDP.

This aims to be a complete article list of economics topics:

Economic geography Subfield of human geography and economics

Economic geography is the subfield of human geography which studies economic activity and factors affecting them. It can also be considered a subfield or method in economics. There are four branches of economic geography. There is, primary sector, Secondary sector, Tertiary sector, & Quaternary sector.

Feminist economics Gender-aware branch of economics

Feminist economics is the critical study of economics and economies, with a focus on gender-aware and inclusive economic inquiry and policy analysis. Feminist economic researchers include academics, activists, policy theorists, and practitioners. Much feminist economic research focuses on topics that have been neglected in the field, such as care work, intimate partner violence, or on economic theories which could be improved through better incorporation of gendered effects and interactions, such as between paid and unpaid sectors of economies. Other feminist scholars have engaged in new forms of data collection and measurement such as the Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM), and more gender-aware theories such as the capabilities approach. Feminist economics is oriented towards the goal of "enhancing the well-being of children, women, and men in local, national, and transnational communities."

Development economics is a branch of economics which deals with economic aspects of the development process in low income countries. Its focus is not only on methods of promoting economic development, economic growth and structural change but also on improving the potential for the mass of the population, for example, through health, education and workplace conditions, whether through public or private channels.

Rural area Geographic area that is located outside towns and cities

In general, a rural area or a countryside is a geographic area that is located outside towns and cities. The Health Resources and Services Administration of the United States Department of Health and Human Services defines the word rural as encompassing "...all population, housing, and territory not included within an urban area. Whatever is not urban is considered rural." Typical rural areas have a low population density and small settlements. Agricultural areas and areas with forestry typically are described as rural. Different countries have varying definitions of rural for statistical and administrative purposes.

Underdevelopment

Underdevelopment, relating to international development, reflects a broad condition or phenomena defined and critiqued by theorists in fields such as economics, development studies, and postcolonial studies. Used primarily to distinguish states along benchmarks concerning human development—such as macro-economic growth, health, education, and standards of living—an "underdeveloped" state is framed as the antithesis of a "developed", modern, or industrialized state. Popularized, dominant images of underdeveloped states include those that have less stable economies, less democratic political regimes, greater poverty, malnutrition, and poorer public health and education systems.

Development studies is an interdisciplinary branch of social science. Development studies is offered as a specialized master's degree in a number of reputed universities around the world, such as the University of Cambridge, the London School of Economics and Political Science, King’s College London, the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex, Oxford University, Harvard University, Balsillie School of International Affairs, Graduate Institute Geneva, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, SOAS London, Tata Institute of Social Sciences and University of Warwick, and less commonly, as an undergraduate degree, such as at the University of Sussex, University of Guelph, University of Toronto and McGill University. It has grown in popularity as a subject of study since the early 1990s, and has been most widely taught and researched in developing countries and countries with a colonial history, such as the UK, where the discipline originated. Students of development studies often choose careers in international organisations such as the United Nations, World Bank, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), media and journalism houses, private sector development consultancy firms, corporate social responsibility (CSR) bodies and research centers.

International economics is concerned with the effects upon economic activity from international differences in productive resources and consumer preferences and the international institutions that affect them. It seeks to explain the patterns and consequences of transactions and interactions between the inhabitants of different countries, including trade, investment and transaction.

Development theory Theories about how desirable change in society is best achieved

Development theory is a collection of theories about how desirable change in society is best achieved. Such theories draw on a variety of social science disciplines and approaches. In this article, multiple theories are discussed, as are recent developments with regard to these theories. Depending on which theory that is being looked at, there are different explanations to the process of development and their inequalities.

Frances Julia Stewart is professor emeritus of development economics and director of the Centre for Research on Inequality, Human Security and Ethnicity (CRISE), University of Oxford. A pre-eminent development economist, she was named one of fifty outstanding technological leaders for 2003 by Scientific American. She was president of the Human Development and Capability Association from 2008–2010.

In China today, poverty refers mainly to the rural poor, decades of economic development has reduced urban extreme poverty. According to the World Bank, more than 850 million Chinese people have been lifted out of extreme poverty; China's poverty rate fell from 88 percent in 1981 to 0.7 percent in 2015, as measured by the percentage of people living on the equivalent of US$1.90 or less per day in 2011 purchasing price parity terms,which still stands for 2022.Chinese definition of extreme poverty is more stringent than that of World Bank, and is defined as earning less than $2.30 a day at purchasing power parity (PPP),Since the start of far-reaching economic reforms in the late 1970s, growth has fueled a substantial increase in per-capita income lifting people out of extreme poverty. China's per capita income has increased fivefold between 1990 and 2000, from $200 to $1,000. Between 2000 and 2010, per capita income also rose by the same rate, from $1,000 to $5,000, moving China into the ranks of middle-income countries. Between 1990 and 2005, China's progress accounted for more than three-quarters of global poverty reduction and a big factor in why the world reached the UN millennium development of dividing extreme poverty by two. This can be attributed to a combination of a rapidly expanding labour market, driven by a protracted period of economic growth, and a series of government transfers such as an urban subsidy, and the introduction of a rural pension. The World Bank Group suggests that the percentage of the population living below the international poverty line of $1.9 fall to 0.7 percent in 2015, and poverty line of $3.2 to 7% in 2015.At the end of 2018, the number of people living below China's national poverty line of ¥2,300 (CNY) per year was 16.6 million, which translated to 1.7% of the population at the time.

Structuralist economics is an approach to economics that emphasizes the importance of taking into account structural features (typically) when undertaking economic analysis. The approach originated with the work of the Economic Commission for Latin America and is primarily associated with its director Raúl Prebisch and Brazilian economist Celso Furtado. Prebisch began with arguments that economic inequality and distorted development was an inherent structural feature of the global system exchange. As such, early structuralist models emphasised both internal and external disequilibria arising from the productive structure and its interactions with the dependent relationship developing countries had with the developed world. Prebisch himself helped provide the rationale for the idea of Import substitution industrialization, in the wake of the Great Depression and World War II. The alleged declining terms of trade of the developing countries, the Singer–Prebisch hypothesis, played a key role in this.

Rural economics is the study of rural economies, including:

Stephen Charles Smith is an economist, author, and educator. He is Chair of the Department of Economics, and Professor of Economics and International Affairs at George Washington University. He is also a Research Fellow of the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA).

Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research

The Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER) is a research centre located in Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg.

Gender and development is an interdisciplinary field of research and applied study that implements a feminist approach to understanding and addressing the disparate impact that economic development and globalization have on people based upon their location, gender, class background, and other socio-political identities. A strictly economic approach to development views a country's development in quantitative terms such as job creation, inflation control, and high employment – all of which aim to improve the ‘economic wellbeing’ of a country and the subsequent quality of life for its people. In terms of economic development, quality of life is defined as access to necessary rights and resources including but not limited to quality education, medical facilities, affordable housing, clean environments, and low crime rate. Gender and development considers many of these same factors; however, gender and development emphasizes efforts towards understanding how multifaceted these issues are in the entangled context of culture, government, and globalization. Accounting for this need, gender and development implements ethnographic research, research that studies a specific culture or group of people by physically immersing the researcher into the environment and daily routine of those being studied, in order to comprehensively understand how development policy and practices affect the everyday life of targeted groups or areas.

Overurbanization is a thesis originally developed by scholars of demography, geography, ecology, economics, political science, and sociology in thrergence of International Nongovernmental Organizations Amid Declining States. The term is intentionally comparative and has been used to differentiate between developed and developing countries. Several causes have been suggested, but the most common is rural-push and urban-pull factors in addition to population growth.

Effects of economic inequality

Effects of income inequality, researchers have found, include higher rates of health and social problems, and lower rates of social goods, a lower population-wide satisfaction and happiness and even a lower level of economic growth when human capital is neglected for high-end consumption. For the top 21 industrialised countries, counting each person equally, life expectancy is lower in more unequal countries. A similar relationship exists among US states.

References

  1. Todaro, Michael. "The Urban Employment Problem in Less Developed Countries – An Analysis of Demand and Supply" . Retrieved January 14, 2014 via ProQuest.
  2. "American Economic Review Citation as one of top 20 articles in last century". American Economic Review. CiteSeerX   10.1.1.453.9219 . doi:10.1257/aer.
  3. "Textbook, 10th - 12th Editions".
  4. "Economic Development publisher's website" . Retrieved 6 June 2011.