Poverty and Economic Growth

Why are some countries rich and other are poor? Economic growth theory has been developed to answer this question. In this post I provide useful sources to know about growth and poverty.

First, you have to start with Banerjee and Duflo's Poor Economics. Building schools in poor countries? Okay, it's definitely important. But is it the end of the story? No. You have to think, think, and think. Build schools, then what? Build schools, then hire teachers. Okay, then if you suppose that they will work hard for children, read this book. The book let you think radically. The problem is not easy.

Then, read non-technical books - Acemoglu and Robinson's Why Nations Fail, Jeffrey Sachs' The End of Poverty, and Robert Allen's Global Economic History. You may also enjoy Michael Spence (Nobel Prize Winner in Economics)'s The Next Convergence.

After reading non-technical books and being interested in more, then read textbooks on economics. Many intermediate textbooks on macroeconomics, such as Mankiw and Blanchard, have chapters on economic growth. More specialized (yet accessible) books are Charles Jones and David Weil.

At this stage, you are advised to see data. The best data is provided in the Penn World Table, which is widely used by professional economists. Plus, Charles Jones has a kind of dictionary of economic growth. If you read this, you are done.

But if you want to pursue more, try graduate-level textbooks on economic growth. Barro and Martin is still easy to follow, so is Aghion and Howitt. The most challenging one - Introduction to Modern Economic Growth - is written by one of the leaders in the field, Daron Acemoglu. If you can read this book, you must be a researcher of poverty and economic growth!