อ1.2 Economics and Development Studies
The study of economic development is one of the newest, most exciting, and
most challenging branches of the broader disciplines of economics and political
economy. Although one could claim that Adam Smith was the first “development
economist” and that his Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, was
the first treatise on economic development, the systematic study of the problems
and processes of economic development in Africa, Asia, and Latin
America has emerged only over the past five decades or so. Although development
economics often draws on relevant principles and concepts from other
branches of economics in either a standard or modified form, for the most part it
is a field of study that is rapidly evolving its own distinctive analytical and
methodological identity.2
The Nature of Development Economics
Traditional economics is concerned primarily with the efficient, least-cost allocation
of scarce productive resources and with the optimal growth of these
resources over time so as to produce an ever-expanding range of goods and
services. Traditional neoclassical economics deals with an advanced capitalist
world of perfect markets; consumer sovereignty; automatic price adjustments;
decisions made on the basis of marginal, private-profit, and utility calculations;
and equilibrium outcomes in all product and resource markets. It assumes economic
“rationality” and a purely materialistic, individualistic, self-interested
orientation toward economic decision making.
Political economy goes beyond traditional economics to study, among other
things, the social and institutional processes through which certain groups
of economic and political elites influence the allocation of scarce productive
resources now and in the future, either for their own benefit exclusively or for
that of the larger population as well. Political economy is therefore concerned