ABSTRACT
The chapter illustrates how distinctive perspectives gained from economic concepts and abstract models can help inform public discourses on economic issues and dispel popular economic fallacies. Examples are drawn especially from developing country settings. It is argued that, in spite of the attempts at grand narratives through universally applicable theoretical constructs, useful economics is necessarily eclectic, so that the students of economics in developing countries can gain by trying to relate textbook theories to their own socio-cultural settings. In doing so, they have the advantage of observing the actual functioning of markets in a whole range of institutional settings, from rural hats and bazaars to modern shopping malls. Moreover, some of the recent theoretical advances in economics, such as the theory of market with information asymmetry, are often more readily applicable in the context of less developed countries. There may be unexplored ingredients in these new ideas in explaining why markets function better in some environments than others and can, thereby, contribute better to economic development.
