Natural resources, technological progress, and economic modernization

Abstract

The present inquiry focuses on the modernization perspectives of the commodity‐exporting countries through the lens of development economics. To this end, the study adopts the Kaldorian framework to address the modernization effects, epitomized in the absorption of surplus labor. To trace the process of economic modernization, the study augments Lewis’s dualistic economy model by the extractive sector. Three different scenarios for the management of resource revenues are scrutinized. An altruistic mode, which implies a pure redistribution of the revenues among the poor swaths of the population, protracts the process of economic modernization, requires a greater amount of capital stock, and harbors a greater risk of a poverty trap. This effect is less pronounced if the modern sector is more capital‐intensive. A productive mode, which elicits full reinvestment of the commodity revenues, in contrast, accelerates the pace of economic modernization. Further, predicated on the scrutiny of a more realistic scenario, a bargaining mode, the study derives the condition for a net positive (or negative) modernization effect. The study identifies technical progress alongside capital accumulation as a further important source of economic modernization.

The Role of Gender and Institutional Dynamics in Adapting Seed Systems to Climate Change: Case Studies from Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda

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An extensive data set on energy, economy, environmental pollution and institutional quality in the petroleum-reliant developing and transition economies

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Corporate Power in the Bioeconomy Transition: The Policies and Politics of Conservative Ecological Modernization in Brazil

“…Although the country lacks a unified bioeconomy strategy (as the EU and various European countries for example have), Brazilian scientists, government agencies and the business sector-notably well-established agroindustries such as the sugarcane one-have readily adopted the new umbrella term [9,17,44]. In a sense, the bioeconomy has been Brazil's prime way of engaging with ecological modernization, i.e., economic and technological modernization that seeks to address perceived environmental issues [28,45].…”