Essays in economic development

Abstract

The difficulties and obstacles faced by the poorer nations of the global economy on the path to development are extremely diverse. It is the aim of this thesis to address some of the interesting questions related to the key obstacles. As such, this thesis is neither wholly empirical or theoretical, macro or micro and instead may be viewed as an eclectic mix of approaches and ideas that go some way toinvestigating the challenges faced by the world's least developed economies. The first chapter explores the varying effects of aspects of institutional quality on different categories of economic volatility, introducing a unique exogenous instrument for political aspects of the institutional bundle. The second chapter investigates the theory behind the largely failed policy of import substitution industrialisation and promotes a policy of diversification across production in the primary commodity sector within developing countries; specifically that this type of diversification can insulate developing economies from the effects of highly volatile primary commodity prices. The third chapter develops the general equilibrium model of appropriation and production of Grossman and Kim (1996) in order to investigate the effect that the pointiness of the contested resource can have on conflict intensity. The fourth and final chapter extends the discrete time, overlapping generations model of Chakraborty and Das (2005), demonstrating that the inclusion of child mortality reinforces the persistence and prevalence of child labour.