Development Policymaking and the Roles of Market, State, and Civil Society - ECONDEV

Economic Planning

a deliberate governmental attempt to coordinate economic decision making over th elong run and to influence, direct, and in some cases, even control th elevel and growth of a natin's principal economic variables (income, consumption, employment, investment, saving, exports, imports, etc.) to achieve a prefetermined set of development objectives.

Economic Plan

a specific set of quantitative economic targets to be reached in a given period of time, with a stated strategy for acheiving those targets; may be comprehensive or partial.

Comprehensive Plan

sets its targets to cover all major aspects of the national economy.

Partial Plan

covers only a part of the national economy-industry, agriculture, the public sector, the foreign sector, and so forth.

Planning Process

an exercise in which a government first chooses social objectives, then sets various targets, and finally organizes a framework for implementing, coordinating, and monitoring a development plan.

Subsistence Sector

consists of small-scale private farms and handicraft shops selling a part of their production to local markets.

Small-scale individual

or family-owned commerical business and service activities in the formal and informal urban sectors.

Medium Size Commercial Enterprises

These include businesses related to agriculture, industry, trade, and transport owned and operated by local entrepreneurs

Large jointly owned or foreign-owned enterprises

manufacturing enterprises, mining companies, and plantations, catering primarily to foreign markets but sometimes with substantial local sales.

Large Domestic-Based Firms

primarily locally managed and largelly locally owned, often listed on national stock markets in countries.

Aggregate Growth Models

involving macroeconomic estimates of planned or required changes in principal economic variables; deals with the entire economy in terms of a limited set of macroeconomic variables deemed most critical to the determination of levels and growth rates of national output: savings, investment, capital stocks, exports, imports, foreign assistance, and so on; also provides a convenient method for forecasting output growth over a three- to five-year peod.

Multisector input-output

the activities of the major industrial sectors of th eeconomy are interrelated by means of a set of simultaneous algebraic equations expressing the specific production processes or technologies of each industry; views industries as producers of outputs and users of inputs from other industries.

Economic Infrastructure

the capital embodied in roads, railways, waterways, airways, and th eother forms of transportation and communication plus water supplies, electricity, and public services such as health and education.

Governmental Economic Policy

industrial licensing, the setting of tariffs, and the manipultion of quotas, wages, interest rates, and to stimulate, direct, and in some cases even control private ecoomic activity so as to ensure a harmonious relationship between the desires of private business operators and the social objectives of the central government.

Market Failure

a phenomenon that results from the existence of market imperfections that weaken the functioning of a market economy.

Resource Mobilization and Allocation

stresses that developing economies cannot afford to waste their very limited financial and skilled human resources on unproductive ventures.

Attitudinal or Psychological Impact

it may succeed in ralying the people behind th egovernment in a national campaign to eliminate poverty, ignorance, and disease or to boost ntional prowess.

Foreign Aid

with a shopping list of projects, governments are better equipped to solicit foreign assistance and persuade donors that their money will be used as an essential ingredient in a well-conceived and internally consistent plan of action.

Project Appraisal

The quantitative analysis of the relative desirability (profitability) of investing a given sum of public or private funds in alternative projects.

Cost-Benefit Analysis

a tool of economic analysis in which the actual and potential private and social costs of various economic decisions are weighed against actual and potential private and social benefits.

Social Profit

The difference between social benefits and social costs, both direct and indirect.

Accounting Prices or Shadow Prices

Prices that reflect the true opportunity costs of resources

Market Prices

Prices established by demand and supply in markets.

Exchange Rate

rate which the domestic currency may be converted into a foreign currency such as the U.S dollar.

Corruption

the appropriation of public resources for private purposes through the use and abuse of official power or influence.

Antipoverty Strategy

elimination of corruption and improvement of governance, in general, can thus also be viewed as part of an antipoverty strategy.

Decentralization

trends toward this and greater urban self-government have been growing in the developing world as democracy has spread in Latin America and elsewhere, and the political process has allowed for providing greater autonomy, notably more fiscal autonomy, for regional and local levels of government; resulted from a combination of pressures from local government and popular organization and from international agencies.

Development Participation

if the goal of economic growth is human development, then without participation, we could have economic growth witout development.; also a means to further human capabilities and other goals of development.