Economic Development - Social Science Research

Social Science Research

The study of economic development by social scientists encompasses theories of industrial/economic modernization causes, the historical phases or waves of economic development, and the organizational aspects of enterprise development in modern societies. Economic development embraces sociological research on a variety of topics including: business organization, enterprise development, evolution of markets and management, and cross-national comparisons of industrial organization patterns. One example inquiry would be: "Why are levels of direct foreign investment and labour productivity significantly higher in some countries than in others?"

In economics, the study of economic development was borne out of an extension to traditional economics that focused entirely on national product, or the aggregate output of goods and services. Economic development was concerned in the expansion of people’s entitlements and their corresponding capabilities, morbidity, nourishment, literacy, education, and other socio-economic indicators. Borne out of the backdrop of Keynesian, advocating government intervention, and neoclassical economics, stressing reduced intervention, with rise of high-growth countries (Singapore, South Korea, Hong Kong) and planned governments (Argentina, Chile, Sudan, Uganda), economic development, more generally development economics, emerged amidst these mid-20th century theoretical interpretations of how economies prosper. Also, economist Albert O. Hirschman, a major contributor to development economics, asserted that economic development grew to concentrate on the poor regions of the world, primarily in Africa, Asia and Latin America yet on the outpouring of fundamental ideas and models.

Read more about this topic:  Economic Development

Famous quotes containing the words social, science and/or research:

    There was a time when the average reader read a novel simply for the moral he could get out of it, and however naïve that may have been, it was a good deal less naïve than some of the limited objectives he has now. Today novels are considered to be entirely concerned with the social or economic or psychological forces that they will by necessity exhibit, or with those details of daily life that are for the good novelist only means to some deeper end.
    Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964)

    The science hangs like a gathering fog in a valley, a fog which begins nowhere and goes nowhere, an incidental, unmeaning inconvenience to passers-by.
    —H.G. (Herbert George)

    The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is “What does a woman want?”
    Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)