Development management

Описание мероприятия

Описание программы

This course uses an institutional approach to examine the development process and to analyse the roots of developmental and anti-developmental experiences in countries, regions and organisations. The approach draws on institutional theories from political science, sociology and the new institutional economics.

The objectives specifically include:

• To explain institutions and organisations as theoretical concepts.
• To analyse the development implications of different organisational forms.
• To examine coordination in the increasingly complex institutional systems that characterise the most advanced countries.
• To explore how characteristics of this complex interdependence are related to the persistence of high and low states of development.

Assessment

This course is assessed by a three hour unseen written examination.

Учебный план:

Part 1: Theoretical background

• Institutional theories: Institutions, organisations and development management; the importance of managing the transformation from less to more effective institutions. 

Part 2: Governance

• Public order and theories of the State: The origins and role of the state; Leviathan vs. social contract approaches; political accountability, order, and public policymaking in conditions characteristic of lessdeveloped countries.
• Democracy and decentralisation: Fiscal architecture, hierarchical relations within government, and government responsiveness; residual power; interest groups vs. civic groups, organisation and voice, and political representation.
• International aid and international governance: Aid, conditionality and national sovereignty; the concept and limitations of ‘global governance’; its effects on trade and aid flows; their ultimate effects on countries’ development prospects.

Part 3: Private provision: The market and beyond

• Hierarchy, co-operation & incentives in private firms: Pure market exchange; the theoretical origins of firms; the role of hierarchy in efficiency and coordination.
• Real firms, small firms: microentrepreneurs and the informal sector: Theory of the firm applied to real, third-world market conditions; the origins of the informal sector; prospects for its development.
• Common resources and private solutions for collective action: The economic characteristics of common property resources; the pervasiveness of Tragedies of the Commons and environmental degradation in LDCs; implications for efficiency; possibilities for private solutions and collective action; empirical examples from LDCs

Part 4: Empirical studies of transformation and decomposition

• Institutions vs. geography vs. values: Why are some countries rich and others poor? Competing theories of the determinants of development; empirical evidence for each.
• Analytical narratives on development failure: Why do some countries ‘dedevelop’? The cases of Venezuela, Zimbabwe and Pakistan; cross-country evidence of development failure.
• Analytical narratives on development success: Why do some countries succeed? Can their success be replicated? The cases of China and Botswana; cross-country evidence of development success.
• Towards a theory of development management: A synthesis of the theory of parts 1 and 2 with the empirics of part 3; the determinants of development success; successful management of the transition to a rapid development process.

Результат обучения:

At the end of the course and having completed the essential reading and activities students should be able to:

• explain the role of incentives in political behaviour and economic performance
• map the links from different organisations and institutions to the incentives they put in place
• compare and contrast why certain organisations are better suited to certain types of services and/or environments than others
• map the links from incentive systems to micro and macro-level economic performance
• discuss what stable institutional constellations comprise, how they come about, and under which conditions they perish.