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 in a financial year. Statisticians conventionally measure such growth as the percent rate of increase in the real and nominal gross domestic product (GDP).
In the economics study of the public sector, economic and social development is the process by which the economic well-being and quality of life of a nation, region, local community, or an individual are improved according to targeted goals and objectives.
Nicholas Kaldor, Baron Kaldor, born Káldor Miklós, was a Hungarian-born British economist. He developed the "compensation" criteria called Kaldor–Hicks efficiency for welfare comparisons (1939), derived the cobweb model, and argued for certain regularities observable in economic growth, which are called Kaldor's growth laws. Kaldor worked alongside Gunnar Myrdal to develop the key concept Circular Cumulative Causation, a multicausal approach where the core variables and their linkages are delineated.
Development economics is a branch of economics that deals with economic aspects of the development process in low- and middle- 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.
Peter Thomas Bauer, Baron Bauer, FBA was a Hungarian-born British development economist. Bauer is best remembered for his opposition to the then widely-held notion that the most effective manner to help developing countries advance is through state led development planning supported by foreign aid.
Poverty reduction, poverty relief, or poverty alleviation is a set of measures, both economic and humanitarian, that are intended to permanently lift people out of poverty. Measures, like those promoted by Henry George in his economics classic Progress and Poverty, are those that raise, or are intended to raise, ways of enabling the poor to create wealth for themselves as a conduit of ending poverty forever. In modern times, various economists within the Georgism movement propose measures like the land value tax to enhance access to the natural world for all. Poverty occurs in both developing countries and developed countries. While poverty is much more widespread in developing countries, both types of countries undertake poverty reduction measures.
William Russell Easterly is an American economist specializing in economic development. He is a professor of economics at New York University, joint with Africa House, and co-director of NYU’s Development Research Institute. He is a Research Associate of NBER, senior fellow at the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD) of Duke University, and a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington DC. Easterly is an associate editor of the Journal of Economic Growth.
Michael Robert Kremer is an American development economist currently serving as University Professor in Economics at the University of Chicago and Director of the Development Innovation Lab at the Becker Friedman Institute for Research in Economics. Kremer formerly served as the Gates Professor of Developing Societies at Harvard University, a role he held from 2003 to 2020. In 2019, Kremer was jointly awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, together with Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee, "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty."
The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It is a 2007 book by Paul Collier, Professor of Economics at Oxford University, exploring the reasons why impoverished countries fail to progress despite international aid and support. In the book Collier argues that there are many countries whose residents have experienced little, if any, income growth over the 1980s and 1990s. On his reckoning, there are just under 60 such economies, home to almost 1 billion people.
Esther Duflo, FBA is a French-American economist currently serving as the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In 2019, she was jointly awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences alongside Abhijit Banerjee and Michael Kremer "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty".
Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee is an Indian-born American economist who is currently the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is co-founder and co-director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), an MIT based global research center promoting the use of scientific evidence to inform poverty alleviation strategies. In 2019, Banerjee shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer, "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty." He and Esther Duflo are married, and became the sixth married couple to jointly win a Nobel or Nobel Memorial Prize.
The World Development Report (WDR) is an annual report published since 1978 by the World Bank. Each WDR provides in-depth analysis of a specific aspect of economic development. Past reports have considered such topics as agriculture, youth, equity, public services delivery, the role of the state, transition economies, labour, infrastructure, health, the environment, risk management, and poverty. The reports are the Bank's best-known contribution to thinking about development.
The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) is a global research center based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology aimed to reducing poverty by ensuring that policy is informed by rigorous, scientific evidence. J-PAL funds, provides technical support to, and disseminates the results of randomized controlled trials evaluating the efficacy of social interventions in health, education, agriculture, and a range of other fields. As of 2020, the J-PAL network consisted of 500 researchers and 400 staff, and the organization's programs had impacted over 400 million people globally. The organization has regional offices in seven countries around the world, and is headquartered near the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Dean Karlan is an American development economist and social entrepreneur currently serving as chief economist of the United States Agency for International Development. Alongside his role at USAID, he is the Frederic Esser Nemmers Distinguished Professor of Economics and Finance at Northwestern University where, alongside Christopher Udry, he co-directs the Globe Poverty Research Lab at the Kellogg School of Management.
Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty (2011) is a non-fiction book by Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo, both professors of Economics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences laureates. The book reports on the effectiveness of solutions to global poverty using an evidence-based randomized control trial approach. It won the 2011 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award.
Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, first published in 2012, is a book by economists Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, who jointly received the 2024 Nobel Economics Prize for their contribution in comparative studies of prosperity between nations. The book applies insights from institutional economics, development economics, and economic history to understand why nations develop differently, with some succeeding in the accumulation of power and prosperity and others failing, according to a wide range of historical case studies.
The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor is a 2014 book by the development economist William Easterly. It traces the history of the fight against global poverty, and examines the structural incentives of development. Easterly contends that poverty reduction has been used as a tactic to take away the rights of the poor and give power to the state and corporations. He suggests poverty reduction is better served by greater respect for individual freedom than a reliance on technocracy.
Pascaline Dupas is a French economist whose research focuses on development economics and applied microeconomics, with a particular interest in health, education, and savings. She is a professor in economics and public affairs at Princeton University and is a co-chair of the Poverty Action Lab's health sector. She received the Best Young French Economist Prize in 2015.
Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems is a 2019 nonfiction book by Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo, both professors of economics at MIT. It was published on November 12, 2019 by PublicAffairs (US), Juggernaut Books (India), and Allen Lane (UK). The book draws from recent developments in economics research to argue solutions to the issues facing modern economies and societies around the world, including slowing economic growth, immigration, income inequality, climate change, globalization and technological unemployment. It is their second collaborative book since the publication of their book Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty (2011) and their first since becoming a married couple in 2015. The book's publication comes a month after Banerjee and Duflo were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics, shared with Harvard University professor Michael Kremer.
The 2019 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded jointly to the economist couple Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo-Banerjee and their colleague Michael Kremer "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty". Banerjee and Duflo are the sixth married couple to jointly win a Nobel Prize. The press release of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences noted:
"The research conducted by this year's Laureates has considerably improved our ability to fight global poverty. In just two decades, their new experiment-based approach has transformed development economics, which is now a flourishing field of research. They have laid the foundations of the best way to design measures that reduce global poverty"
