Deals and Development: The Political Dynamics of Growth Episodes

Lant Pritchett · Kunal Sen · Eric Werker

Nov 2017 · Oxford University Press

About this ebook

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. When are developing countries able to initiate periods of rapid growth and why have so few of these countries been able to sustain growth over decades? Deals and Development: The Political Dynamics of Growth Episodes seeks to answer these questions and many more through a novel conceptual framework built from a political economy of business-government relations. Economic growth for most developing countries is not a linear process. Growth instead proceeds in booms and busts, yet most frameworks for thinking about economic growth are built on the faulty assumption that a country's economic performance is largely stable. Deals and Development explains how growth episodes emerge and when growth, once ignited, is maintained for a sustained period. It applies its new framework to examine the growth of countries across a range of institutional and political contexts in Africa and Asia, using the examples of Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Malaysia, Thailand, Ghana, Liberia, Malawi, Rwanda and Uganda. Through these country analyses it demonstrates the explanatory power of its framework and the importance of feedback cycles in which economic trends interact with political behaviour to either sustain or terminate a growth episode. Offering a lens through which to analyse complex scenarios and unwieldy amounts of information, this book provides actionable levers of intervention to bring around reform and improve a country's chance at achieving transformative economic growth.

About the author

Lant Pritchett is Professor of the Practice of International Development at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, a Senior Fellow of the Center for Global Development, and a senior fellow of BREAD. He has been part of the team producing many World Bank reports, including World Development Report 1994: Infrastructure for Development, and World Development Report 2004: Making Services Work for the Poor. In addition he has authored (alone or with one of his 22 co-authors) over 50 papers published in refereed journals, chapters in books, or as articles, as least some of which are sometimes cited. In 2017, he published Building State Capability: Evidence, Analysis, Action (co-authored with Matt Andrews and Michael Woolcock) with Oxford University Press. Kunal Sen is Professor of Development Economics in the Global Development Institute, University of Manchester, and Joint Research Director of the DFID-UK funded Effective States and Inclusive Development (ESID) Research Centre. His current research is on the political economy of development. Kunal Sen's recent authored books are The Political Economy of India's Growth Episodes and Out of the Shadows? The Informal Sector in Post-Reform India. He has won the Sanjaya Lall Prize in 2006 and Dudley Seers Prize in 2003 for his publications. Eric Werker is Associate Professor in the Beedie School of Business at Simon Fraser University and academic lead from SFU to the Canadian International Resources and Development Institute. He researches how less developed countries can build more thriving and inclusive private sectors, particularly when they are rich in natural resources, and how international actors can play a positive role in creating successful societies. In previous roles, Eric was on the faculty of Harvard Business School, ran the International Growth Centre Liberia program, and worked as a consulting economist at Conservation International and the Millennium Challenge Corporation.