0.1 Economic development is about all of economics  (Page 8/14)

Why? Because the world economy and world trade are changing so fast.

Until the 21st century, individuals and nations could prosper by extracting value from the stock of knowledge already produced (in biology, information technology and innovations generally).

For the future, we may expect that economic growth - will depend heavily upon active and continuous participation in flows of new knowledge . And these flows will be in a state of perpetual renewal, in nanotech, biotech and infotech, to name a few examples.

The best, perhaps only, way to deal with this big shift - is investment in human capital.

2) The Role of Women in Development

A growing economic role for women turns out to be important not just for economic growth, but for fertility decline, societal health and many other important quality of life issues. The female labor force participation rate is one indicator of the role of women in society. By way of reference, the labor force participation rate for women in the U.S. ages 15 and 65 in 2007 was 69.7%. World Bank, World Development Report 2013: JOBS . Washington, DC: World Bank, Table 1, p.345. This figure fell to about 64% during the recession of 2008-2010. By 2014, the labor force participation rate for men was also about 64%. For all developing nations together the average labor force participation rate for males and females was 53% in 2007. However, for many of the fastest growing nations in the period 1990-2009, the labor force participation rates for women rose sharply. In some rapidly growing nations the increases in the women’s rate were especially striking: Brazil (30%), Chile (23%), Colombia (45%), Peru (54%) and Korea (14%). And while higher female participation rates are no guarantee of high growth, declining rates are typical in such slowly growing or stagnant nations as Albania, Ivory Coast, Haiti and Zimbabwe.

In general, societies that fail to make use of the talents and skills of over half the population can expect to have low economic growth over long periods of time, unless they possess very large per capita endowment of oil and gas.

And, while critical for economic growth , a growing role for women in the economy is even more important for economic development and quality of life improvements. Consider fertility rates: the number of children a woman will bear over her lifetime. We will see in Chapter 2 that in the past 30 years, there has been a very sharp decline in fertility rates around the world , especially in nations outside of the Middle East. Half of humanity is now having only enough children to replace itself (2.1% fertility rate or less). In 1970, only 24 nations had a rate of 2.1% or less. Now there are 70 nations. As we will see it turns out that rising female participation in the labor force explains much of the decline in fertility. In turn , rising female participation in the labor force has been very dependent upon increased investment in Human Capital in primary and secondary education of women.

3) The Role of Institutions in Economic Development See Acemoglu, D., S. Johnson and J. Robinson, “The Rise of Europe”, The American Economic Review, Vol. 95(3): 546-579.