Seminar with professor Richard Doner on The Middle-Income Trap: More Politics than Economics

Rick Doner – in collaboration with Ben Ross Schneider, MIT, USA – argue that economists have identified the existence of a middle income trap but have yet to analyze, much less theorize, the politics of this trap. They argue that the trap has two core components. First, the policies necessary to upgrade productivity -- as in human capital and innovation -- require enormous investment in institutional capacity. Second, these institutional challenges come just at the time when political capacity for building these institutions is weak due primarily to the fragmentation of potential support coalitions. Politics in particular are stalled by fractured social groups, especially business and labor, and inequality generally. These conditions resulted in large measure from previous trajectories of growth. Their empirical analysis is centered on nine larger middle income countries.

Richard Doner is Goodrich C. White Professor of Political Science, Emory University, Atlanta. He has published on several issues in books and international journal articles, focusing on the automobile industry in Southeast Asia, the limits to state interventions in the market economy, dynamics of financial crises, business associations, Thailand’s political-economic development and the politics of innovation.

Schedule:
Professor Laurids Lauridsen, RUC, will be discussant, and the seminar will be chaired by associate professor, Peter Wad, CBS. The seminar will mark the launch of a reformed M.SC. Business and Development  (BaDS) program at CBS, and it will be open for (BaDS) students, the CBDS Network and for other interested people at CBS and beyond.

The seminar takes place on Tuesday, September the 1st , 15.20-17.00 at CBS, Kilen, Ks54.

Refreshments (tea/coffee etc…) will be provided during the break.

If you wish to participate in the seminar, please register no later than 2pm Monday the 31st of August so we can order enough refreshments to go around.

You can register by sending an email to Eddy: eda.ikl@cbs.dk with the subject ‘Rick Doner seminar registration’.