Journal and Internet Resources on
Economic Development
Journal and Internet Resources on Economic Development
to accompany
Economic Development
E.Wayne Nafziger
Ramesh Mohan
Copyright © 2005 E. Wayne Nafziger Economic Development.
The contents or parts thereof, may be reproduced in print form solely for classroom use with Nafziger, Economic Development provided such reproduction bears copyright notice, but may not be reproduced in any other form without prior written consent of E.Wayne Nafziger in any network or other electronic storage or transmission, or broadcast for distance learning.
Journals on Economic Development & Developing Countries
The instructor and student should find the following journals useful. The most widely cited development journals include the Journal of Development Economics (JDE), a journal from North-Holland which requires more theoretical and mathematical rigor; Economic Development and Cultural Change (EDCC), from the University of Chicago Press; the Journal of Development Studies (JDS), from Frank Cass in London; World Development (WD), a source on development policy from Pergamon Press in Britain; Environment and Development Economics from Cambridge University Press; Developing Economies, a Japanese journal in English, published in Tokyo; and Journal of Economic Growth, a theoretical and empirical research in economic growth and dynamic macroeconomics. Development and Change, a theoretical journal from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, Finance and Development, a monthly journal dealing with policy issues from the Bank and Fund; the World Bank Research Observer, which discusses issues of development policy and theory of interest to the World Bank; the IMF Staff Papers, an international trade and monetary journal; and the IMF Survey and World Bank Survey, weekly newsletters with up-to-date reports, are other useful sources. Other development journals include the Journal of International Development; Oxford Development Studies; the Review of Development Economics; the Journal of Development Planning, a United Nations journal; the Journal of Developing Areas, an interdisciplinary development journal from Tennessee State University; the IDS Bulletin, from a leading British development institute, the Institute for Development Studies at Sussex University, Brighton; the International Development Review, the policy-oriented journal of the Society for International Development; International Economic Insights, from the Institute for International Economics, Washington, D.C.; and the Third World Quarterly, an interdisciplinary journal. Population and Development Review and the Population Bulletin are major journals discussing population, labor force growth, and economic development. In addition, the Journal of Economic Literature frequently has excellent surveys in development economics; other general economics journals sometimes have articles on development (economic journals are listed at http://www.helsinki.fi/WebEc/journals.html). Each of the major LDC regions--Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America--have major development journals, as do the United Nations regional agencies. An excellent popular source, the weekly London Economist, frequently has articles on development. Undergraduates with a strong interest in development economies should investigate WD, Finance and Development, EDCC, JDS, Journal of International Development; Oxford Development Studies; the IDS Bulletin, and regional journals.
ONLINE JOURNALS AND DATABASES
JSTOR, a computer file with images and full text online access to back issues of selected journal in economics and other fields, is restricted to institutions with a site license to the collection http://www.jstor.org/.
EconLit is a database with a comprehensive indexed bibliography with abstracts of the world’s economic literature, 1969 to the present, with over 300 major economic journals and collected volumes, compiled from the American Economic Association's Journal of Economic Literature and the Index of Economic Articles. www.econlit.org/
Online access to EconLit is through
WebSPIRS Database by libraries, university network systems, and individual
subscriptions. Hints for searching EconLit are at http://www.econlit.org/. You can select title, author, subject,
or words anywhere. You can limit the search to given years and whether the
entry is an article, book, book review, dissertation, paper, or volume. In
addition, you can search by field, economic development, or by geographic
descriptors, developing countries,
At EconLit, when I typed Sen (for
words anywhere), for the Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, an expert on poverty
and inequality, I found 866 entries; for author, 491 entries; and for
title, 56 entries. For “terms of trade,” I accessed 1,234 for words anywhere,
473 for title, and 5 for subject. For developing countries, there were 15,159
for words anywhere, and for developing countries, 1995-2000, 3,736. For
University or college libraries may subscribe to journal on-line services, or publishers may provide on-line versions of articles to libraries subscribing to hard copies, thus providing students with on-line access to a wealth of journal articles. Find out what databases and on-line services your library has.
Current issues of the three American Economic Association journals are available to library and individual
subscribers at http://www.aeaweb.org/e-pubs.
Ideas at http://ideas.repec.org/ is probably the largest bibliographic database dedicated to economics and available on the internet. Over 285,000 items of research can be browsed or searched, and over 190,000 can be downloaded in full text! This site is part of a large volunteer effort to enhance the free dissemination of research in Economics, RePEc.
ISI Web of Knowledge, by library or other subscription, enables searches by topic, author, journal, or address; and by articles that cite an author or work.
GENERAL RESOURCES IN ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
The Internet is rich with resources on developing countries and their economies. Students can rarely write a high-quality paper on economic development by using only internet resources, but they are of help in finding references to printed sources. Nafziger’s Home Page has links to many of these useful sites. Should an internet location change, email the author at nafwayne@ksu.edu, with TEXT URL DRIFT in the subject line.
A list of international agencies is available at: http://www.ksu.edu/economics/nafwayne/agencies.htm
The home pages of international agencies provide information and sometimes free downloads of articles:
Selected examples:
The World Bank http://www.worldbank.org/, including the annual World Development Report;
The International Monetary Fund http://www.imf.org/, including the semi-annual World Economic
Outlook;
The World Trade Organization http://www.wto.org/;
The United Nations http://www.un.org/; and the United Nations Development Program
To subscribe to the World Bank’s Development News, which highlights current news on
For news about the World Bank, go towww.worldbank.org/developmentnews
You can access links to 25 international agencies from http://altaplana.com/Gate.international.html including regional organizations, commissions, and development banks, such as the UN Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), the Asian Development Bank, the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP), the Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA), the Inter-American Development Bank, the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, the European Central Bank, the European Commission, Eurostat (EC Statistical Office), and the UN Economic Commission for Europe.
The UNU/World Institute for Development Economics has links at
http://www.wider.unu.edu/links/links.htm
The
issues related to development, is at http://www.iie.com/.
World income inequality databases are at
http://www.undp.org/poverty/initiatives/wider/wiid.htm.
The Penn World Tables, on purchasing power parity GDP, are at http://datacentre2.chass.utoronto.ca/pwt/.
Collections, publications, and institutions in economic development are at http://www.helsinki.fi/WebEc/frameo.html.
Economics departments, institutes, and research centers in the world in economic development are at http://netec.mcc.ac.uk/EDIRC/ecdev.html.
A sample of institutions included are the Society for International Development, the Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies (Dhaka), the Development Research Center of the State Council (Beijing, China), the United Nations University’s World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU/WIDER, Helsinki), the Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research (Mumbai, formerly Bombay, India), the Institute on Developing Economies (Tokyo, Japan), the Forum on Debt and Development (FONDAD, the Hague, Netherlands), the Philippine Institute for Development Studies (PIDS, Manila), the International Development Research Centre (Johannesburg, South Africa), the Korea Development Institute (KDI, South Korea), the Overseas Development Institute (London, UK), Queen Elizabeth House (Oxford University, Oxford, UK), and the Institute of Development Studies (University of Sussex, Brighton, UK).
The Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) has a virtual library in economic development at http://w3.acdi-cida.gc.ca/Virtual.nsf/pages/index_e.htm, with topics, country-specific resources, regional resources, organizations, and development reference desk.
Topics include:
development and development aid; economy and finance; environment; human rights – democracy - good governance; international relations; social, cultural, and socio-economic; and a more detailed outline of sites.
Organizations include:
educational institutions, foundations, government, ministries of foreign affairs, government aid agencies, international financial institutions, general international organization, international organizations, networks, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), private sector, research institutions, and a more detailed outline of sites in organizations.
CIDA or http://www.unsystem.org/ lists UN organizations or international organizations with statistical information, for example,
UN organizations with statistical information include UN Development Program, population documents, Global resource information database, UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), Food and Agriculture Organization, Statistics Division, UNICEF’s annual report, Education for All: Country Reports, Population Information Network, International Labour Organization database, InfoNation (for viewing and comparing the most up-to-date statistical data for member states, national trade performance, UN Industrial Development Organization, UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), World Health Organization (WHO), UNESCO –Statistics on Education, SPESS A (an interactive program sponsored by the Association for the Development of Education in Africa, ADEA, that allows access to statistical data and information on the statur of educational systems in Africa), UN Statistics Division – Development Indicators, and World Income Inequality Database (WID). The information available is mixed, with some of these UN sites having data and monographs, and others only ordering information and advertisements for sources on sale.
CIDA’s site on the environment is at http://w3.acdi-cida.gc.ca/Virtual.nsf/pages/index_e.htm, where you click “topics” and then “environment.”
http://caster.ssw.upenn.edu/~restes/praxis.html has a social and economic development reference room; development assistance agencies, organizations, and policies; levels of social development practice; sustainable development links; development studies home pages and news services; sectoral resources for social and economic development; resources on historically disadvantaged population groups; country resources; regional resources; major reports of international and comparative social research; funding resources for research on comparative social development; careers in social and economic development; international travel; and other sites.
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD’s) Centre for Co-operation with Non-Members (CCNM), at http://www.oecd.org/sge/ccnm/, is the focal point for the development and pursuit of policy dialogue between the OECD and non-member economies. The CCNM has studies on developing and transitional countries, including both general and country studies.
Development Economics Abstracts (by subscription) are at http://www.ssrn.com/link/development.html, a Working Paper Series, published by Economics Research Network, a division of Social Science Electronic Publishing, Inc. (SSEP) and Social Science Research Network (SSRN).
EASTERN EUROPE ,
CENTRAL ASIA , AND JAPAN
The
European Banks for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), at http://www.ebrd.com//, provides a menu of EBRD activities by
country. Selecting Russia, for example, gives you the EBRD’s activities
on
Links
to
SEARCHING
Lexis-Nexis enables you to get information on a third-world economy by topic, at http://web.lexis-nexis.com/universe. News stories are archived for more than 20 years. Find out if your college or university subscribes. For other search engines, similar to Lexis-Nexis and EconLit, you can fine-tune your search by specifying more than one keyword, or combining a keyword with additional term (s). Search engines facilitate finding sources and data on the web efficiently.
Once I used Google to search the web
for material on “poverty,” I found 1,570,000 entries. However, when I typed in
“Sen” (see above) in “search within results” it narrowed the search to 41,900.
A further “search within results” by typing
NATURAL RESOURCES AND THE ENVIRONMENT
http://www.ksu.edu/economics/nafwayne/envweb.htm lists numerous sources on natural resources and the environment in developing countries and globally.
Steve Hackett’s Internet resources on environmental economics is at http://www.humboldt.edu/~envecon/internet.html
Also see CIDA’s site above
OTHER ECONOMICS SITES
http://www.ksu.edu/economics/nafwayne/economic.htm lists some.
NEWS ON DEVELOPING COUNTRIES
BBC http://www.bbc.co.uk/home/today/;
CNN http://www.cnn.com/,
Economist http://www.economist.com/
Financial Times www.ft.com/ (if you have a fixed terminal)
New York Times www.nytimes.com/ (if you have a fixed terminal)
International Herald Tribune www.iht.com/, an overseas newspaper that includes articles from the New
York Times and other news sources. Those
in the US
http://www.ipl.org/div/news/ and http://www.onlinenewspapers.com/ for recent news from a country’s newspapers.
www.undp.org/dpa/index.html provides links to development news.
COUNTRY AND MAP INFORMATION ON DEVELOPING COUNTRIES
www.state.gov/www/background_notes/ for background notes on countries.
OTHER REFERENCES
http://encyclopedia.com/, for updated
encyclopedia entries.
A description, features, and table of contents of Nafziger, Economic Development, 5th ed. is at
http://www.cambridge.org/uk, search for Nafziger Economic Development.
Instructor’s and Students’ Resources at
http://www.k-state.edu/economics/nafwayne/Nafzdev.htm
Thanks to Margaret
Parks, David Rintoul, and