Irma Adelman

Most of the world's population and the vast majority of the world's poor live and work in villages. Their activities are usually centred in households, but interactions among households shape the impacts of policy, market and environmental changes on rural production, incomes, employment and migration. This book presents a generation of villagewide economic modelling designed to capture these interactions when assessing the impacts of policy, market and environmental changes on rural economies in less developed countries. The authors present a general framework for modelling village economies based on computable general-equilibrium techniques, estimate models for villages and a village-town in five different countries, and use these models to conduct a series of comparative experiments. The findings offer explanations for some paradoxical outcomes of exogenous shocks as their influence winds its way through rural economies, and they underline the importance of adopting a local economy-wide perspective when designing development policies.

Most of the world's population and the vast majority of the world's poor live and work in villages. Their activities are usually centred in households, but interactions among households shape the impacts of policy, market and environmental changes on rural production, incomes, employment and migration. This book presents a generation of villagewide economic modelling designed to capture these interactions when assessing the impacts of policy, market and environmental changes on rural economies in less developed countries. The authors present a general framework for modelling village economies based on computable general-equilibrium techniques, estimate models for villages and a village-town in five different countries, and use these models to conduct a series of comparative experiments. The findings offer explanations for some paradoxical outcomes of exogenous shocks as their influence winds its way through rural economies, and they underline the importance of adopting a local economy-wide perspective when designing development policies.

Dynamics and Income Distribution brings together Irma Adelman’s pioneering applications of econometrics, as well as papers on the poverty and income distribution implications of growth and development. The volume combines some early papers on business cycles and long swings with other pieces focusing on just economic development. With a firm emphasis on the dynamics of income inequality, this volume includes empirical study of how inequality changes with economic development and the conceptual development of dynamic indices of income inequality. Professor Adelman’s papers draw on quantitative simulation models and the experience of specific countries to discuss policies to alleviate poverty and reduce inequality. The author argues that trickle-down processes are not likely to reduce poverty sufficiently rapidly. Land reform and the equal access to education need to be focused in order to generate the initial conditions for equalizing economic development. Economic development and poverty reduction, she suggests, require an emphasis on education, on institutions determining access to jobs and resources, and on labour-intensive types of economic growth. With its companion volume, Institutions and Development Strategies, this collection of selected essays makes a significant contribution by improving access to Irma Adelman’s pioneering work on the economics and policy of development.

Institutions and Development Strategies brings together the major contributions which Irma Adelman has made to our understanding of development strategies and the role of institutions in economic development. Featuring pioneering work on the quantitative analysis of institutions as well as a series of contributions on long-term development policy, this book includes original approaches to the measurement of institutional characteristics and novel statistical techniques. Several papers address the conceptual issues posed by the quantification of qualitative aspects of development. Others use novel econometric approaches to explore how growth-promoting institutions change with development levels. Still others focus on modelling politics and microeconomic institutions. These papers provide empirical evidence for the recent resurgence of interest in institutional aspects of economic growth. The section on development strategies presents simulation models comparing alternative development strategies. Written over the last 30 years, these papers represent the shifts in her thinking from advocacy of import substitution to export led growth, to income-distribution-oriented strategies and, finally, to agricultural development led industrialization. This volume combines theoretical, statistical-descriptive, historical and modelling approaches to its discussion of these issues. With its companion volume, Dynamics and Income Distribution, these volumes of selected essays make a significant contribution by improving access to Irma Adelman's pioneering work on the economics and policy of development.