Diverse Development Paths and Structural Transformation in the Escape from Poverty

This volume analyzes the experiences of developing countries in Asia, Latin America, and Sub-Saharan Africa, and examines how they might catch up.

Based on growth performance across the developing world over the last five decades, it offers a thorough account of the possibilities to engage in such processes in an increasingly globalized world. Together, the chapters highlight the diversity and variation of development pathways and provide valuable lessons and implications for how to approach this difficult question. The book shows the importance of acknowledging that the process of development is dynamic and that the possibilities for catch up are situation dependent. At the same time it makes clear that without structural change, and in particular agricultural transformation, sustained catch up is unlikely to happen.

The volume demonstrates how analysis of current growth processes in developing countries can be enriched by paying closer attention to the multifaceted nature of both economic backwardness and successful pathways to escape it.

Martin Andersson is Professor at CIRCLE, Lund University. He has worked as a consultant for the World Bank and has been a Marie Curie post-doc at EUI in Florence and a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley. His research interests include agricultural development and the relation between economic growth, poverty reduction, and distribution of income in the developing world. He is co-editor of Development and Structural Change in Asia-Pacific (Routledge, 2003).

Tobias Axelsson is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Economic History at Lund University. His research is on agricultural transformation processes and colonial origins of inequality. He has been a guest researcher at ISEAS in Singapore and a guest research fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden. Dr Axelsson is a co-founder of the Bachelor programme in development studies at Lund University.