Climbing a High Ladder – Development in the Global Economy by Otaviano Canuto published by Police Center for the New South (2021).
“Economic development analysis must inevitably rely on a double methodological standpoint. On the one hand, it needs to search for common features, those general attributes that might be present in all national experiences of wealth accumulation, poverty reduction, and moving up the income ladder. On the other, in order to be meaningful, it must reckon with time and space. It must consider that those universal development traits will play out in specific historical and geographical circumstances that will condition their unfolding.
Development economics has always combined the search for stylized common ‘stages of growth’ with the taking into consideration of the historical and geographical context in which those ‘stages’ are crossed. For instance, it makes a huge difference if a country starts to industrialize as a single unit, like England in its original experience, or at a moment in which a fully-fledged industrialized global economy is the environment. Circumstances matter as they bring different challenges and opportunities when passing through the stages of growth.
In this book, we try to follow that dual approach. Although each chapter is written in a way that makes it readable as a standalone piece, there is a tentative common thread: we attempt to understand what has meant to climb the income ladder in the context of the global economy prior to and after the 2007-08 global financial crisis…”
