The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists' Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics

by William Easterly

Book Overview

Why economists' attempts to help poorer countries improve their economic well-being have failed.

Since the end of World War II, economists have tried to figure out how poor countries in the tropics could attain standards of living approaching those of countries in Europe and North America. Attempted remedies have included providing foreign aid, investing in machines, fostering education, controlling population growth, and making aid...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0262550423
• ISBN13: 9780262550420
• Release Date: August 2002
• Publisher: MIT Press
• Length: 356 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.1" x 8.9"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

delightful read for PhD economists

If you spent 4+ years in graduate school learning about macroeconomics and teaching watered down versions to undergrads, this is a really fun read. All those old-timer theories that seemed to have simply been orphaned in the literature are given a well-deserved empirical refutation. I think we learn so much by acknowledging the explicit failures of previously popular theories, and it sets economics apart from other social sciences.Easterly has just the right amount of experience, technical training, and compassion for his subject. Someone should send a copy to Bono of U2 and all the other commentators who think development is as simple as debt foregiveness and good intentions.

A brilliant, important, and highly readable book.

This is a brilliant and important book. After you spend only 15 minutes reading the intro & part of chapter 1, you will see very clearly that the topic is of critical importance for the majority of people on this planet. The book is also very well-written: complex material (when it appears) is explained in terms the average college-educated person can grasp, and Easterly intersperses lots and lots of real-world anecdotes to always keep reminding the reader why we should care about this topic. And he succeeds in making us care. In order to have any chance at all of devising policies that will actually succeed in improving the plight of the impoverished peoples of the world, we must first examine what's been tried, and understand why it hasn't worked. This is Easterly's plan for the book. For each main paradigm used to understand economic growth and development, Easterly explains the main concepts, explains the basis for the policies that were tried, and offers his analysis of why these policies failed. Easterly believes there's a common theme in understanding what hasn't worked and what might work, and he explains it clearly in his book. If you are a teacher or student of economics, I especially recommend this book. It very nicely explains the economic intuition behind a LOT of economic theory, including some fairly recent theory that hasn't yet trickled down into undergraduate intermediate level textbooks. It also motivates all the theory with lots and lots of compelling real-world examples. The Elusive Quest for Growth doesn't offer a balanced look at all viewpoints; that is not its goal. Easterly has a strong point of view, which I guess could be labeled "conservative." Some liberals think that conservatives care more about big business than about the poor, or labor, or the environment (and indeed there are many examples of Republican policies in the U.S. that support this view - just look at Bush's record on the environment). However, Easterly's sole concern is helping the poor, not pushing a conservative agenda down the reader's throat. At the time I write this, there are 16 other reader reviews, only 3 of which are negative. Two of these three reviews are almost identical and must have been written by the same person ("T Biamonte from Stamford, CT USA"). This reviewer clearly disagrees with Easterly's politics, but his review in my opinion really doesn't offer any effective criticism of Easterly's book itself, not the writing, or the soundness of Easterly's analysis, or the evidence Easterly uses to support this arguments. So I encourage you to check out this book. ...

There are no easy answers to third world growth

For 5/6ths of the people of Earth, life is a daily struggle for basic needs: food, shelter, medicine. Infant mortality rates are high, women are oppressed, and individuals have limited opportunities to improve their lot. William Easterly is a Senior Advisor in the Development Research Group of the World Bank. In his first book, he asks why trillion dollars of foreign aid to the countries of the "third world" since WWII have caused essentially no improvement in the quality of life for the people in these countries. I found the writing lucid and the many real stories of poverty and corruption both emotionally powerful and insightful. Emphasizing a key mantra of economics -- people respond to incentives -- he details the long list of foreign aid tactics that have failed: capital investment (machines, factories, roads), education, birth control, loans, and loan forgiveness. Not that any of the tactics are bad, but rather they are ineffectual in a country lacking key social, political, and economic infrastructure. Easterly then describes in detail the factors at play in driving growth: increasing returns (Leaks, Matches, Traps), creative destruction through technology, luck, governments kill growth, government corruption, and class and race conflicts. Easterly shows that achieving economic growth is very difficult, but he does a great job of identifying the key systemic issues that poor countries must address. Perhaps surprisingly, Easterly's model applies equally well to the economic disparities that exist within countries, even "rich" countries like the United States. The increasing returns model says that highly-skilled people will prefer to live and work with one another ("Matches"), as each of them will be more productive for being around other highly-skilled individuals. So this explains, for example, why areas like Silicon Valley, having once achieved critical mass, continue to grow. And why low-income inner-city and rural areas remain depressed ("Traps").

Deft deflation of myths

This is surely the most important book published in the field of development economics for many years. The author, who is Senior Adviser to the Development Research Group at the World Bank, is highly familiar with economic theory and empirical research, and is able to expound his knowledge in an engaging and jargon-free manner. Easterly's aim - in which he succeeds brilliantly - is to show the self-defeating nature of most conventional prescriptions for development, notably foreign aid, investment in technology, education, population control and debt forgiveness. Against all these chimeras - many, if not all, of which, are desirable in their own right in some circumstances - he poses the economic common sense of provision of incentives. The argument is complex but two of Easterley's observations are especially worth noting. The professional (and almost always economically-untrained) development lobbyists are fond of arguing that what they tendentiously call the neo-liberal consensus ignores the poorest. Easterley demonstrates that this is untrue, citing the work of David Dollar and Aart Kray of the World Bank, who have found that global poverty is attributable, rather, to lack of growth. Using statistical techniques to isolate the direction of causation, these analysts find that a 1 per cent increase in per capita growth in the developing countries causes a 1 per cent rise in the incomes of the poor.Secondly, debt cancellation has become a fashionable cause for development lobbyists and the Churches - unaware, apparently, that the idea has been tried for at least 20 years (I recall it very well from my time at the Debt and Capital Markets Group at the Bank of England in the 1980s) and has resulted in a self-perpetuating cycle of bad lending. Eaterley's proposal is to tie lending to past performance (i.e. good economic management) to give Third World governments an incentive to pursue growth-creating policies. The alernative - unconditional debt forgiveness - would damage Third World living standards by ensuring a rise in developing countries' cost of capital. Easterley does not spell it out, but affluent western campaigners' demanding a course of action that the Third World would end paying a high cost for is not the most edifying of spectacles.This book puts paid to much self-serving nonsense. It is a rare gem in a quarry of dross.

The Emperor's Clothes

The Elusive Quest for Growth, by Bill Easterly, a senior advisor in the research department of the World Bank, is a must read for anyone interested in global development. Its appeal lies in its unprecedented reach and candor in surveying the assumptions and theories underlying the development assistance provided by richer countries and international agencies to poorer countries. Easterly's conclusion is that the emperor (the international aid industry) has almost no clothes. While one can quibble with the specifics of some of his analysis, the overall effect is a compelling, authoritative book that makes it impossible to avoid facing the fact that the current aid framework needs a radical overhaul. The aid industry has spent about 1 trillion dollars over the last forty years, and the returns have been disappointing. Fortunately, Easterly points the way toward the beginning of a new wardrobe. There's bad news and good news. The bad news is that nearly all of the theories that drive the design of aid programs are not borne out by the experience to date. Most fundamentally, the formal mathematical models underlying the macroeconomic analyses of organizations such as the World Bank and IMF are built on two plausible but wrong assumptions. The first of these is that investment drives growth. Unfortunately, the record shows that investment only drives growth in those few cases where it is made in conjunction with appropriate technology, know-how, and a sound overall economic policy environment. The second wrong assumption is that aid increases investment. Extensive analysis indicates that most governments simply consume rather than invest the aid they receive. The striking thing about these two faulty pillars of the development paradigm is that even the best aid organizations continue to use a framework that they know is wrong. Easterly also takes a sober look at fads that have swept through the field of development. The first of these is education. Many people argued that investment in basic education is the key to stimulating growth, and this has led to massive investments and high hopes. Unfortunately, in retrospect the evidence shows little correlation between education investment and growth. The same holds true with population control, where the link between population dynamics and growth has proven to be far more complex that originally expected. Easterly does not conclude that the evidence shows that education or population planning is unimportant; to the contrary, they can be effective but only in a broader context where other important conditions are also present. What are some of these broader conditions that must be in place? Fortunately, we have made some progress in understanding what helps counties develop economically and socially. In particular, there is strong evidence that economic growth is the best way of reducing poverty in developing countries. Contrary to what many think, a one percent increase in overall incom