EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Understanding the Mechanisms of Economic Development

Angus Deaton ()

No 1225, Working Papers from Princeton University, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Research Program in Development Studies.

Abstract: I argue that progress in understanding economic development (as in other branches of economics) must come from the investigation of mechanisms; the associated empirical analysis can usefully employ a wide range of experimental and non-experimental methods. I discuss three different areas of research: the life-cycle saving hypothesis and its implication that economic growth drives higher rates of national saving, the theory of speculative commodity storage and its implications for the time-series behavior of commodity prices, and the relationship between economic growth and nutritional improvement. None of these projects has yet been entirely successful in offering a coherent account of the evidence, but all illustrate a process of trial and error, in which although mechanisms are often rejected, unlikely theoretical propositions are sometimes surprisingly verified, while in all cases there is a process of learning about and subsequently modifying our understanding of the underlying mechanisms.

Keywords: economic development; mechanisms; life-cycle savings; commodity prices; economic growth; nutritional improvement (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D10 D60 E01 I00 O40 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010-04
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2) Track citations by RSS feed

Downloads: (external link)
https://rpds.princeton.edu/sites/rpds/files/media/ ... _development_jep.pdf

Related works:
Journal Article: Understanding the Mechanisms of Economic Development (2010) Downloads
Working Paper: Understanding the mechanisms of economic development (2010) Downloads
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pri:rpdevs:deaton_understanding_mechanisms_of_economic_development_with_abstract_apr_2010.pdf

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Princeton University, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Research Program in Development Studies. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Bobray Bordelon ().

 
Page updated 2023-05-30
Handle: RePEc:pri:rpdevs:deaton_understanding_mechanisms_of_economic_development_with_abstract_apr_2010.pdf