Jim’s Note: Culture oftentimes gets short attention in economics, yet it’s an enormously powerful factor in determining the success, development, or failure of economies. In the this video, Tarun Khanna looks at China and India. These two countries are neighbors. They are the two most populous countries in the world. Both are rapidly developing and… Read More »
Completing the World Tour In previous units we studied the developed nations, the so-called first world of the G-8 nations. In the last unit we expanded our study to include the BRIC’s and the many other emerging market nations, the nations that can reasonably be projected to converge on first world levels of economic development… Read More »
The history of the world’s poorest nations is intertwined with the history of Imperialism, particularly European and U.S. attempts to build global empires. As the Maddison book has explored, once Columbus, Magellan, de Gama, and other explorers led the way in the 16th century, a handful of European nations (the U.S. would join in the… Read More »
Shifting Our Focus Although economic growth and increases in living standards have happened throughout human history, the really dramatic changes, the growth that truly transformed human life, doubled life expectancy, and made our modern world is a result of industrialization. It is the consequence of the industrial revolution (for our purposes, we can include the… Read More »
Emerging and Newly Industrialized Markets Who Are They? Politically, it is no longer considered acceptable to refer to countries as “second” or “third” world since the connotation is often taken to imply a secondary, or less-important political status.In this course I use the terminology “second world” not to mean secondary in importance, but rather as… Read More »