The best economic development books

This book is a rare attempt by an eminent economic historian to examine cultural determinants of economic growth and answer the question why it happens, which distinguishes it sharply from the discipline’s exclusive focus on how it proceeds.

Landes, in other words, disentangles the explanation of causes from the preoccupation with the process, which is why I recommend this book.

In this classic and pioneering study, Joseph Love traces how ideas about underdevelopment travelled from interwar Rumania to postwar Brazil, two peripheral regions united in their disenchantment with the promises of economic liberalism.

Household names like Mihail Manoilescu, Raúl Prebisch, and Celso Furtado come across as heirs to a long intellectual tradition connecting Russian Narodnik populism to Latin American dependency theory a century later.

These disparate historical actors were brought together by a shared concern with the obstacles to development posed by a world of structural economic and geopolitical inequalities, thus shining a spotlight on the conflicting interests between the West and the Rest.

Perhaps the strongest argument against expanded migration rights is the fear that too many of the “wrong” kind of immigrants might kill the goose the laid the golden egg that makes a country attractive to migrants in the first place. If immigrants have harmful cultural values, vote for dangerous political leaders, or otherwise undermine the political and economic system, they could degrade the host nation’s institutions. In the extreme case, they might even replicate the same awful conditions that led them to flee their country of origin. Wretched Refuse is the most thorough analysis and refutation of such concerns. Nowrasteh and Powell use both historical and modern evidence to show that institutional concerns about immigration are largely misplaced and that migrants strengthen liberal democracy far more than they undermine it.

This book is about the planners who set about devising the rules and institutions of the post-WWII international economic order.

The conventional story is that institutions like the IMF and World Bank were mainly creations of American and British policymakers, and the rules enshrined in those institutions reflect narrowly Anglo-American ideas and interests. But Helleiner’s amazing historical research reveals that officials from countries in the so-called “periphery” of the world economy (like China, India, and Brazil) had much more influence in these negotiations than we realized.

Their courageous efforts ensured that some of their developmental ideas (aimed at reducing the massive global wealth and power imbalances) were, in fact, incorporated into the international rules that shaped the postwar economic order. The politics of economic ideas come to life in this book. 

This is a bestselling book that tackles the most important question in economics: why some countries are rich, and some are poor.

This well-written and convincing book provides a very broad and accessible overview of history of successful and failing societies. It argues that inclusive democratic institutions deliver better economic outcomes than authoritarian ones.

Given that this view is based on recent research in political economy and development economics – including the authors’ own groundbreaking work – this is a must-read for all advocates of liberal democracy who want to have quantitative arguments and historical narratives to stand up to the rise of authoritarianism around the world. 

I teach political economy of development. My job is to explain to the students why some countries are rich and others are poor.

Acemoglu and Robinson is a wonderful and accessible textbook. Students love it – even if they often argue with the… show more.

The most recent entry on my list is already a landmark achievement.

Margarita Fajardo’s authoritative monograph places the UN’s Economic Commission for Latin America – the incubator for the cepalinos who successfully challenged the postwar consensus on developmental policy – into the broader geopolitical history of the 20th century. This richly detailed study retraces the emergence of an intellectual and political movement that channeled discontent with the structural biases inherent in the global economic order into a cogent agenda of political economy for the peripheries of capitalism.

It also reveals how the fragmentation of the fragile postwar liberal consensus, in both North and South, eventually pushed this movement toward the high-powered framework of dependency theory, and thence into anti-establishment activism across the world.

This book points out how massive the improvements in AI are and how we’re entering a new age of automation.

It’s no longer just muscle power, but also cognitive skills that are being automated and we need to plan for what comes next. Brynjolfsson and McAfee think that if we get the transition right, people will still work full-time. They will still be able to earn most of their income through work.

We will do different types of jobs but full employment will still be a possibility. 

Most people think Europe grew rich through industrialization and free trade. What they don’t realize is that this industrialization was initially started because of protectionism. Prasannan Parthasarathi shows how Britain banned the import of Indian cotton cloth, known as Calico, and developed its own industry. The free trade happened only after Britain succeeded in industrializing.

Deep Economy takes both macro- and micro-economics and breaks them down to their most simplest levels. Examining what we have learned over time from our expanding economy, McKibben examines all of the positive and negative impacts that have occurred during our country’s growth.

With a focus on understanding how groundbreaking innovations can disrupt numerous industries, Deep Economy takes the approach on what leaders can learn from the past and how breakthroughs can (and will) have unintended consequences whether they are positive or negative. Recognizing these patterns and incorporating them into our business decisions can only help us make better decisions.

Have you ever wondered why we can’t just make the world better? Sure, we’ve made enormous strides in agriculture and medicine over the past few centuries. We can generate electricity and move around the world in a day. We can feed and heal people. But why haven’t we just sat down and figured out the right way to live? Planned it all out on a clean sheet, like an architect.

Seeing Like a State is a book about why it’s impossible for ambitious programs of top-down control to succeed, and why they so often end up with millions of people dead. The world is always more complicated than the maps you make of it, and in a lot of situations, it turns out that complexity matters. You can’t design and build the perfect city. You have to grow it.  

This book matters to me as an artist because it… show more.

This book shows how the future of our planet will be decided in Asia. It teaches us that when we aim to tackle climate change with impactful measures, it is not about America or Europe but about Asia.

With its tremendous size and growth in population, Asia will be the dominant continent in the world and therefore be key to solving the climate crisis.  

The aims of economic development are often said to be higher incomes, industrialization, efficient investment, and poverty alleviation.

Amartya Sen argues for a broader goal: increasing the capability of all human beings to achieve those things that they most value.

Such an agenda implies more ambitious goals for empowering people, especially in poor countries, to begin a process of expanding the real freedoms that people enjoy: education, health care, longevity, and the ability to influence political decisions.

Sen, a Nobel laureate in economics, draws on a lifetime of thought about human predicaments, famines, and poverty, how to define one’s capabilities, and the meaning of one’s ‘standard of living.’

Rather than offering specific recipes, this book provides a provocative framework for thought. 

This is an academic book, but it's beautifully written, and not too, too jargony. Tsing does a kind of commodity ethnography, embedding herself in multiple parts of the lifecycle of the Matsutake Mushroom trade, while depicting the worlds of pickers, restauranteurs, mushroom traders and auctioneers, nature guides, and more. She also weaves in a critique of capitalist markets in which these kinds of natural entities now are embedded, which I dig! 

Want solutions? Start with our failed economic system. Daly, a World Bank senior economist, examines the economic restructuring necessary to live on a finite planet. He corrects the errors of classic economics by showing that a human economy is a subsystem embedded in a finite, fragile ecosystem, maintained by extracting limited resources and exporting waste. A steady-state economy accounts for the limits of both resources and waste. 

Masculinities and Femininities in Latin America’s Uneven Development provided further reinforcement for my interest in showing the diversity of masculinities. Paulson’s long history in Latin America and longstanding involvement with gender studies convinced me of her expertise. This was particularly valuable for me, with my limited Latin American experience. Additionally, her discussions of the interactions between notions of masculinity, as perceived and acted out by men with varying degrees of power, was a new way of looking at the issue for me, an eye opener. She clarified some of the dynamics of colonialism as it operates in the present and in that context.

I have picked this book because it tells a story that should interest anyone even if they have no interest in technical economics. Albert Hirschman was born into a Jewish family in Berlin and in his teens became politically committed as a socialist, at a time when the rise of the Nazi party made this a dangerous activity. The book tells the story of his exploits in Germany and occupied Europe before he ended up in the United States, where he made his career as a specialist on economic development, spending a significant part of his life advising the government of Colombia.

Hopefully, the book gives an account of Hirschman’s economic ideas in a way that will make sense even to readers who don’t know any economics, but even without that, it is a sufficiently gripping story of the life of an exile from inter-war Germany who ended up as… show more.

Moretti’s book is, I think, woefully underappreciated. He gives a clear portrait of different regions of the United States, classifying them on the basis of their current economic structure and not on a predetermined political split or on industrial classifications from fifty years ago. It shows that we are in the midst of a substantial economic transformation that likely rivals the shifts seen during the early industrial revolution. This book gives you a real sense of what a “knowledge economy” will look like. More than that, though, he shows how that transformation could be beneficial to everyone (but might not).

The discourse on modern India is often about achievements in science and technology, R&D in national laboratories, and industry. However, in a country of one billion plus people, innovation is happening not just in formal sectors. Ordinary people – farmers, teachers, students, artisans, school dropouts, homemakers – are constantly innovating to solve everyday problems using frugal means. The book is an account of spotting grassroots innovations, nurturing them, and building networks with formal systems and markets. It is critical to understand this process for a deeper appreciation of contemporary India. 

Economic development is critical for municipalities and which helps drive the city planning process.

This book takes actual case studies and discusses each one at length for an entire chapter for a municipality’s planning process since it is heavily dependent upon the economics of an area. This area is critical for practitioners and graduate students understanding economic development and how it impacts a community.

There are a number of case studies throughout the book that cover a wide array of topics (e.g. Non-Profit organization’s involvement), which are important to comprehend how those forces impact the economy for municipalities and counties.

While all the books listed earlier provide detailed, in-depth, case studies of public-private sector cooperation in developing selected new technologies, the last two chapters of this book provide necessarily brief coverages of the myriad ways in which this cooperation had been successfully manifested beyond encouraging specific technologies.

Although the book’s main purpose is to show how a series of important technologies have transformed economic, social, and political life over the millennia, the last two chapters show how knowledge of these transformations sheds light on the wider use of public policy to achieve economic goals.

While many public initiatives have succeeded, others have failed. The authors isolate the reasons for these successes and failures and offer their template for designing and administering policies that are more likely to succeed than fail.