Role of Elites in Economic Development

Elites play a crucial role in the development process. The impact they have on growth and development exceeds their representation within a country. This volume uses case studies from South Africa to China to seek an understanding of the relationship between elites and economic development.

Alice H. Amsden was Barton L. Weller Professor of Political Economy in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT. She was the author of Asia's Next Giant (OUP) and The Rise of "The Rest" (OUP). Her most recent work is A Rational Revolution: Developing from Collective Role Models, Deserting Deductive Theories. She was also appointed by the UN Secretary-General to serve on the United Nations Committee for Development Planning.

Alisa DiCaprio is a Research Fellow at United Nations University's World Institute for Development Economics Research. Prior to joining UNU-WIDER, she was a Post-Doctoral Fellow at New York University's Alexander Hamilton Center for Political Economy. In addition to her academic work, she has worked in the public and private sector supporting US trade policy, researching emerging market opportunities for exporters, and organizing unions in the healthcare sector.

James Robinson is David Florence Professor of Government at Harvard University and a faculty associate at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science. Professor Robinson studied economics at the London School of Economics, the University of Warwick, and Yale University. He previously taught in the Department of Economics at the University of Melbourne and the University of Southern California. Before moving to Harvard he was a Professor in the Departments of Economics and Political Science at the University of California at Berkeley. His main research interest is the political economy of development with a particular interest in Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa.