POL208Y5 Lecture Notes - Lecture 16: New Idea, Maternal Death, Millennium Development Goals
Document Summary
The way policymakers have conceptualized development has changed over time: 1940s and 1950s: linked with security. Following wwii, focus was on reconstructing w. europe to prevent the spread of communism: 1960s-1980s: linked to economic globalization. Attention to integrating decolonizing states into western global capitalist order vs. Eastern communist order: 1990s-present: linked to poverty. The practices and legacies of colonialism: mercantilist era (16th-18th centuries): use military power to enrich imperial governments, colonists favored the mother country over the colony. Lower settler mortality = institutions that enforced law, encouraged investment, fostered economic growth. Higher settler mortality = extractive predation: empirically, where settler mortality was higher in the past, today you see much more underdevelopment. The resource curse : attempts to explain why a number of countries that are rich in natural resources nonetheless have lower economic growth than countries without an abundance of natural resources. It could be that these states have little need to diversify to other productive activities.
