In the Shadow of Violence: Politics, Economics, and the Problems of Development - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1107684919 ISBN 13: 9781107684911

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2012

Synopsis

This book applies the conceptual framework of Douglass C. North, John Joseph Wallis, and Barry R. Weingast's Violence and Social Orders (Cambridge University Press, 2009) to nine developing countries. The cases show how political control of economic privileges is used to limit violence and coordinate coalitions of powerful organizations. Rather than castigating politicians and elites as simply corrupt, the case studies illustrate why development is so difficult to achieve in societies where the role of economic organizations is manipulated to provide political balance and stability. The volume develops the idea of limited-access social order as a dynamic social system in which violence is constantly a threat, and political and economic outcomes result from the need to control violence rather than promoting economic growth or political rights.

About this title

Book Description

This book helps explain how violence is limited by constructing social arrangements in which valuable economic privileges are used to coordinate political coalitions. The volume thus helps account for how and why it can be so difficult to implement development policies designed to raise the rate of economic growth or increase political and civil liberties. There is a logic to the social arrangements of societies that live in the shadow of violence. Until we understand that logic, we are unlikely to understand how to promote economic and political development.

About the Author

Douglass C. North is co-recipient of the 1993 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science. He is Spencer T. Olin Professor in Arts and Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis and Bartlett Burnap Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Professor North received the John R. Commons Award in 1992. He is author of eleven books, including Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance (1990), Understanding the Process of Economic Change (2005), and co-author, with John Joseph Wallis and Barry R. Weingast, of Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History (Cambridge University Press, 2009).

John Joseph Wallis is Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He received his PhD from the University of Washington in 1981 and had a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Chicago. Professor Wallis is an economic historian who specializes in the public finance of American governments and more generally in the relation between the institutional co-development of governments and economics. His large-scale research on American state finance and institutions has been supported by the National Science Foundation.

Steven B. Webb worked at the World Bank for twenty-one years as an economist and advisor on policy research, evaluation and operations for Latin America and the Caribbean and other regions. He currently serves as a consultant to the Bank. Dr Webb's specializations include political economy, decentralization, public finance, central banks and monetary policy and economic history. His publications include Public Sector Reform - What Works and Why (2008), Achievements and Challenges in Decentralization (2000) and Voting for Reform: The Politics of Adjustment in New Democracies (1994, edited with Stephan Haggard).

Barry R. Weingast is the Ward C. Krebs Family Professor in the Department of Political Science and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He received his PhD from the California Institute of Technology in 1977. Professor Weingast spent ten years at Washington University in St. Louis in the Department of Economics and the School of Business. The recipient of the Riker Prize, the Heinz Eulau Prize and the James Barr Memorial Prize, he has also worked extensively with the World Bank and the US Agency for International Development. Professor Weingast co-authored Analytical Narratives (1998) and co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Political Economy (2006).

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1107684919
• ISBN 13: 9781107684911
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 376
• Editor: North Douglass C.