This book combines the human development approach and innovation economics in order to explore the effects that structural economic change has on human development. While economic diversification can provide valuable new social choices and capabilities, it also tends to lead to more complex decision processes and changes to the set of capabilities required by people to self-determine their future. Within this process of structural transformation, social networks are crucial for accessing information and social support, but networks can also be a root cause of exclusion and inequality reproduction. This implies the need to encourage innovation and economic diversification beyond production expansion, focusing on the promotion of human agency and social inclusion. This book provides such a modern perspective on development economics, emphasizing the role of social networks, economic diversity and entrepreneurship for social welfare. The author discusses how innovation, social networks, economic dynamics and human development are interlinked, and provides several practical examples of social and micro-entrepreneurship in contexts as diverse as Peruvian rural villages and Brazil’s urban areas. The interdisciplinary perspective put forward in this book illustrates theoretical and methodological methods of exploring the complexity of development in a practical and relevant way. It also provides useful information about structural factors which need to be considered by practitioners when designing pro-poor growth policies. Furthermore, the coverage of the core concepts of innovation, networks and development economics, enriched with multiple examples, makes it a valuable resource for scholars and advanced students of modern development economics.

Maps capture data expressing the economic complexity of countries from Albania to Zimbabwe, offering current economic measures and as well as a guide to achieving prosperity Why do some countries grow and others do not? The authors of The Atlas of Economic Complexity offer readers an explanation based on "Economic Complexity," a measure of a society's productive knowledge. Prosperous societies are those that have the knowledge to make a larger variety of more complex products. The Atlas of Economic Complexity attempts to measure the amount of productive knowledge countries hold and how they can move to accumulate more of it by making more complex products. Through the graphical representation of the "Product Space," the authors are able to identify each country's "adjacent possible," or potential new products, making it easier to find paths to economic diversification and growth. In addition, they argue that a country's economic complexity and its position in the product space are better predictors of economic growth than many other well-known development indicators, including measures of competitiveness, governance, finance, and schooling. Using innovative visualizations, the book locates each country in the product space, provides complexity and growth potential rankings for 128 countries, and offers individual country pages with detailed information about a country's current capabilities and its diversification options. The maps and visualizations included in the Atlas can be used to find more viable paths to greater productive knowledge and prosperity.

This book combines the human development approach and innovation economics in order to explore the effects that structural economic change has on human development. While economic diversification can provide valuable new social choices and capabilities, it also tends to lead to more complex decision processes and changes to the set of capabilities required by people to self-determine their future. Within this process of structural transformation, social networks are crucial for accessing information and social support, but networks can also be a root cause of exclusion and inequality reproduction. This implies the need to encourage innovation and economic diversification beyond production expansion, focusing on the promotion of human agency and social inclusion. This book provides such a modern perspective on development economics, emphasizing the role of social networks, economic diversity and entrepreneurship for social welfare. The author discusses how innovation, social networks, economic dynamics and human development are interlinked, and provides several practical examples of social and micro-entrepreneurship in contexts as diverse as Peruvian rural villages and Brazil’s urban areas. The interdisciplinary perspective put forward in this book illustrates theoretical and methodological methods of exploring the complexity of development in a practical and relevant way. It also provides useful information about structural factors which need to be considered by practitioners when designing pro-poor growth policies. Furthermore, the coverage of the core concepts of innovation, networks and development economics, enriched with multiple examples, makes it a valuable resource for scholars and advanced students of modern development economics.

The empirical literature on the contributions of human capital investments to economic growth shows mixed results. While evidence from OECD countries demonstrates that human capital accumulation is associated with growth accelerations, the substantial efforts of developing countries to improve access to and quality of education, as a means for skill accumulation, did not translate into higher income per capita. In this Element, we propose a framework, building on the principles of 'growth diagnostics', to enable practitioners to determine whether human capital investments are a priority for a country's growth strategy. We then discuss and exemplify different tests to diagnose human capital in a place, drawing on the Harvard Growth Lab's experience in different development context, and discuss various policy options to address skill shortages.

The purpose of this contributed volume is to consider how global consumption patterns will develop in the next few decades, and what the consequences of that development will be for the economy, policymakers, and society at large. In the long run, the extent to which economic growth translates into better living conditions strongly depends on how rising affluence and new technologies shape consumer preferences. The ongoing rise in household income in developing countries raises some important questions: Will consumption patterns always continue to expand in the same manner as we have witnessed in the previous two centuries? If not, how might things evolve differently? And what implications would such changes hold for not only our understanding of consumption behavior but also our pursuit of more sustainable societies?