Course info

Economic development is more than economic growth. It mainly concerns developing countries. While economics is defined in terms of allocating scarce resources to competing alternatives, economic development is not only about maximising utility within certain budgetary constraints. Development is about regime change in search of an optimal growth path of an economy. Development requires new institutional patterns and organization structures to support such a dynamic change. The evolution of economies from agriculture based to manufacturing and then to a service economy requires completely different institutions capable to handle the change at every stage of development. Economic development then is the structural transformation of human society from subsistence economy to urban industrialisation and to sustain the rise in productivity and income as well as wellbeing. To get a country on the next stages of development requires a leap, normally a break away with the past.