Agricultural Development in the World Periphery


Book Description

This book brings together analysis on the conditions of agricultural sectors in countries and regions of the world’s peripheries, from a wide variety of international contributors. The contributors to this volume proffer an understanding of the processes of agricultural transformations and their interaction with the overall economies of Africa, Asia and Latin America. Looking at the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – the onset of modern economic growth – the book studies the relationship between agriculture and other economic sectors, exploring the use of resources (land, labour, capital) and the influence of institutional and technological factors in the long-run performance of agricultural activities. Pinilla and Willebald challenge the notion that agriculture played a negligible role in promoting economic development in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the impulse towards industrialization in the developing world was more impactful.




Agriculture and Economic Development in Europe Since 1870


Book Description

This book adopts a revisionist perspective on the European economy, addressing the lack of coherent study of the agricultural sector and reassessing old theories about the links between agricultural and economic development.




Pathways from the Periphery


Book Description




Key Concepts in Economic Geography


Book Description

"A comprehensive and highly readable review of the conceptual underpinnings of economic geography. Students and professional scholars alike will find it extremely useful both as a reference manual and as an authoritative guide to the numerous theoretical debates that characterize the field." - Allen J. Scott, University of California "Guides readers skilfully through the rapidly changing field of economic geography... The key concepts used to structure this narrative range from key actors and processes within global economic change to a discussion of newer areas of research including work on financialisation and consumption. The result is a highly readable synthesis of contemporary debates within economic geography that is also sensitive to the history of the sub-discipline." - Sarah Hall, University of Nottingham "The nice thing about this text is that it is concise but with depth in its coverage. A must have for any library, and a useful desk reference for any serious student of economic geography or political economy." - Adam Dixon, Bristol University Organized around 20 short essays, Key Concepts in Economic Geography provides a cutting edge introduction to the central concepts that define contemporary research in economic geography. Involving detailed and expansive discussions, the book includes: An introductory chapter providing a succinct overview of the recent developments in the field. Over 20 key concept entries with comprehensive explanations, definitions and evolutions of the subject. Extensive pedagogic features that enhance understanding including figures, diagrams and further reading. An ideal companion text for upper-level undergraduate and postgraduate students in economic geography, the book presents the key concepts in the discipline, demonstrating their historical roots and contemporary applications to fully understand the processes of economic change, regional growth and decline, globalization, and the changing locations of firms and industries. Written by an internationally recognized set of authors, the book is an essential addition to any geography student′s library.




Science for Agriculture and Rural Development in Low-income Countries


Book Description

Facing new challenges with respect to sustainable agriculture and rural development strategies for low-income countries, related to global environmental change and globalization of markets, an interdisciplinary Wageningen University and Research Centre group set out to draw lessons from the DLO-IC projects of the last eight years. In discussing the way ahead and a future agenda, a number of major research challenges, as well as policy questions are outlined.




The Core-Periphery Divide in the European Union


Book Description

This book revisits the forgotten history of the 'European Dependency School' in the 1970s and 1980s, explores core-periphery relations in the European integration process and the crises of the contemporary European Union from a dependency perspective, and draws lessons for alternative development paths. Was disintegration of the European Union foretold? With the benefit of hindsight, the critical analysis of the European integration process by researchers from the 'European Dependency School' is most timely. The current framework of the European Union seems to be haunted by issues that had been very familiar to the researchers of the 'European Dependency School', such as a lack of a common and balanced industrial policy. How do the situations compare? What lessons can be learnt for alternative development policies in contemporary Europe? Weissenbacher tackles these issues, which are of relevance to all interested in political economy, political science, development studies and regional development.




The Making of a Periphery


Book Description

Island Southeast Asia was once a thriving region, and its products found eager consumers from China to Europe. Today, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia are primarily exporters of their surplus of cheap labor, with more than ten million emigrants from the region working all over the world. How did a prosperous region become a peripheral one? In The Making of a Periphery, Ulbe Bosma draws on new archival sources from the colonial period to the present to demonstrate how high demographic growth and a long history of bonded labor relegated Southeast Asia to the margins of the global economy. Bosma finds that the region’s contact with colonial trading powers during the early nineteenth century led to improved health care and longer life spans as the Spanish and Dutch colonial governments began to vaccinate their subjects against smallpox. The resulting abundance of workers ushered in extensive migration toward emerging labor-intensive plantation and mining belts. European powers exploited existing patron-client labor systems with the intermediation of indigenous elites and non-European agents to develop extractive industries and plantation agriculture. Bosma shows that these trends shaped the postcolonial era as these migration networks expanded far beyond the region. A wide-ranging comparative study of colonial commodity production and labor regimes, The Making of a Periphery is of major significance to international economic history, colonial and postcolonial history, and Southeast Asian history.




World Development Report 2009


Book Description

Rising densities of human settlements, migration and transport to reduce distances to market, and specialization and trade facilitated by fewer international divisions are central to economic development. The transformations along these three dimensions density, distance, and division are most noticeable in North America, Western Europe, and Japan, but countries in Asia and Eastern Europe are changing in ways similar in scope and speed. 'World Development Report 2009: Reshaping Economic Geography' concludes that these spatial transformations are essential, and should be encouraged. The conclusion is not without controversy. Slum-dwellers now number a billion, but the rush to cities continues. Globalization is believed to benefit many, but not the billion people living in lagging areas of developing nations. High poverty and mortality persist among the world's 'bottom billion', while others grow wealthier and live longer lives. Concern for these three billion often comes with the prescription that growth must be made spatially balanced. The WDR has a different message: economic growth is seldom balanced, and efforts to spread it out prematurely will jeopardize progress. The Report: documents how production becomes more concentrated spatially as economies grow. proposes economic integration as the principle for promoting successful spatial transformations. revisits the debates on urbanization, territorial development, and regional integration and shows how today's developers can reshape economic geography.




Trade and Poverty


Book Description

How the rise of globalization over the past two centuries helps explain the income gap between rich and poor countries today. Today's wide economic gap between the postindustrial countries of the West and the poorer countries of the third world is not new. Fifty years ago, the world economic order—two hundred years in the making—was already characterized by a vast difference in per capita income between rich and poor countries and by the fact that poor countries exported commodities (agricultural or mineral products) while rich countries exported manufactured products. In Trade and Poverty, leading economic historian Jeffrey G. Williamson traces the great divergence between the third world and the West to this nexus of trade, commodity specialization, and poverty. Analyzing the role of specialization, de-industrialization, and commodity price volatility with econometrics and case studies of India, Ottoman Turkey, and Mexico, Williamson demonstrates why the close correlation between trade and poverty emerged. Globalization and the great divergence were causally related, and thus the rise of globalization over the past two centuries helps account for the income gap between rich and poor countries today.




The Spread of Modern Industry to the Periphery since 1871


Book Description

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. Ever since the Industrial Revolution of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, industrialization has been the key to modern economic growth. The fact that modern industry originated in Britain, and spread initially to north-western Europe and North America, implied a dramatic divergence in living standards between the industrial North (or 'West') and a non-industrial, or even de-industrializing, South (or 'Rest'). This nineteenth-century divergence, which had profound economic, military, and geopolitical implications, has been studied in great detail by many economists and historians. Today, this divergence between the 'West' and the 'Rest' is visibly unravelling, as economies in Asia, Latin America and even sub-Saharan Africa converge on the rich economies of Europe and North America. This phenomenon, which is set to define the twenty-first century, both economically and politically, has also been the subject of a considerable amount of research. Less appreciated, however, are the deep historical roots of this convergence process, and in particular of the spread of modern industry to the global periphery. This volume fills this gap by providing a systematic, comparative, historical account of the spread of modern manufacturing beyond its traditional heartland, to Southern and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and Latin America, or what we call the poor periphery. It identifies the timing of this convergence, finding that this was fastest in the interwar and post-World War II years, not the more recent 'miracle growth' years. It also identifies which driving forces were common to all periphery countries, and which were not.