The Political Economy of Collective Action, Inequality, and Development

by William D Ferguson

This book examines how a society that is trapped in stagnation might initiate and sustain economic and political development. In this context, progress requires the reform of existing arrangements, along with the complementary evolution of informal institutions. It involves enhancing state capacity, balancing broad avenues for political input, and limiting concentrated private and public power. This juggling act can only be accomplished by resolving collective-action problems (CAPs), which arise when individuals pursue interests that generate undesirable outcomes for society at large. Merging and extending key perspectives on CAPs, inequality, and development, this book constructs a flexible framework to investigate these complex issues. By probing four basic hypotheses related to knowledge production, distribution, power, and innovation, William D. Ferguson offers an analytical foundation for comparing and evaluating approaches to development policy. Navigating the theoretical terrain that lies between simplistic hierarchies of causality and idiosyncratic case studies, this book promises an analytical lens for examining the interactions between inequality and development. Scholars and researchers across economic development and political economy will find it to be a highly useful guide.

Genres: Economics

448 pages, Hardcover

Published May 5, 2020

Reviews

[Benji · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book merges five core developmental hypotheses with a topology of political settlements (PSs) and corresponding social orders.
H1: Development requires establishing social arrangements that deliver key public goods and services and that concurrently mitigate important negative externalities.
H2: Inherent complementarities that emerges from the nonrival properties of knowledge, skill matching, social imitation, and production externalities generate uneven locational and sectoral agglomerations of production, knowledge acquisition, innovation, and growth.
H3: Unequal distributions of power shape the creation, evolution, and demise of economic and political institutions.
H4: Powerful parties, left to themselves, cannot credibly commit to refrain from using their power for their own future benefit.
H5: Policy innovations sometimes relax political and commitment constraints that follow from H3 and H4, as well as free-riding and coordination collective action problems (CAPs) from H1 and H2.

A typology of PSs, market configurations, these five hypotheses, a discussion of power relations, and a consideration of first- and second-order developmental CAPs operating in the context of a capability approach to political and economic development, permits identifying combinations of conditions that may either support or undermine the adoption and implementation of desirable policy prescriptions or institutional configurations.