Developmental Economics
Maria Rizwan
What Is Development Economics?
Development economics is a branch of economics that focuses on improving fiscal, economic,
and social conditions in developing countries. Development economics considers factors such
as health, education, working conditions, domestic and international policies, and market
condition with a focus on improving conditions in the world's poorest countries.
The field also examines both macroeconomic and microeconomic factors relating to the
structure of developing economies, and domestic and international economic growth.
Macroeconomics refers to broadly influencing factors such as interest rates, whereas
microeconomics relates to individual influences.
Problems in economic development of middle and small cities
The economic development of middle and small Chinese cities is not balanced at all. Through
summarizing and analyzing, we discover the following factors:
1.Government and enterprise administrators have mistakenly understood the basic law of
market economy development.
2.In fierce market competition, they fail to emphasize development and management benefits,
strengthen management in development, and accelerate growth via management.
3.Enterprises do not pay sufficient attention to new technical products and scientific research,
and cannot develop new products in time, resulting in insufficient after-effects and competitive
power in the market.
4.Government leaders and functional departments do not have sufficient understanding of the
issues above. Government has not realized that it will serve the enterprises, and governmental
work mechanisms are not in step and do not coordinate with enterprise development.
5.The force of cultivating the tax source is insufficient, and phenomena like killing the goose that
lays the golden egg happen now and then.
6.Some leaders do not study the economy and solve practical problems in economic
development.
, In order to solve these problems, specific efforts can be made as follows:
1.Use educational institutions such as party colleges and cadre schools to hold various study
classes and training classes frequently and invite experts and scholars to give lectures, learn,
and discuss basic economic laws concerning the health competition and economic development
of the socialist market economy, so as to enhance government and enterprise leaders’
competence to control the market economy.
2.Government and functional departments at various levels should change their work-style and
function, strengthen service consciousness, and overcome bureaucracy.
3.The major leader of the enterprise should concentrate on the economy, measure economic
development with time and energy, and pay attention to the technological development of new
products.
4.Actively support enterprises and carefully cultivate tax source.
5.Reinforce public security and maintain social stability, providing a looser and better ‘soft
environment’ for the healthy development of the enterprise. Optimize and standardize the ‘hard
environment’ of investment, and accelerate infrastructure construction.
6.If the secretary of the municipal party committee, the mayor, the secretary, and the factory
manager of the enterprise can discover the correct method for the city and the enterprise,
establish and perfect an operation mechanism suitable for economic development, then the
development of the city and the enterprise will be suited to each other and promoted. They are
the parties to promote economic development.
Surplus resources and disguised unemployment
Two theories emphasized the existence of surplus resources in developing countries as the
central challenge for economic policy. The first concentrated on the countries with relatively
abundant natural resources and low population densities and argued that a considerable
amount of both surplus land and surplus labour might still exist in these countries because of
inadequate marketing facilities and lack of transport and communications. Economic
development was pictured as a process whereby these underutilized resources of the
subsistence sector would be drawn into cash production for the export market. International
trade was regarded as the chief market outlet, or vent, for the surplus resources. The second
theory was concerned with the thickly populated countries and the possibility of using their
surplus labour as the chief means of promoting economic development. According to this
theory, because of heavy population pressure on land, the marginal product of labour (that is,
the extra output derived from the employment of an extra unit of labour) was reduced to zero or