ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a schematic account of the main features of economic development in the world today. It illustrates the economic and social processes within a given society that constitute the system through which wealth and income are produced and distributed. The chapter examines some of the outcomes in the developing world—economic growth, technological change, urbanization, structural transformation, and globalization—as well as poverty, inequality, malnutrition, low literacy, low levels of democracy, and low life expectancy. It discusses the goals that are usually assumed to drive economic development planning and policymaking. Within a market economy, the income flowing to a "factor" of production, including labor, is related to the productivity of that factor. The chapter shows the institutional framework of income creation and distribution, noting that poverty is, in large part, the result of the individual's position within a set of entitlement-generating institutions.
