The World Wide Web is an extremely useful tool for the study of economic development and makes a wonderful supplement to Todaro's Economic Development, 8th edition. Students can access recent data, short articles and numerous scholarly papers encoded as Adobe Acrobat (or "PDF") files. The Acrobat software may be downloaded for free from the Adobe Web site at http://www.adobe.com. The papers can be viewed on screen or saved to your hard drive or other storage device. Most university computers will have Acrobat already installed.
The amount of information available online continues to expand at an exponential rate. Below, I have provided some general information on using the Internet for research and in the classroom. I hope these comments will be useful.
General Information about Research available on the Web:
- There are a number of useful sites for conducting research and learning more about economic development. The single most useful site is the World Bank's extensive site at http://www.worldbank.org which contains short articles as well as longer, more scholarly, papers that are generally available as PDF files. A good place to start navigating the site is the "Development Topics" page that can be reached by clicking the icon from their main page.
- The International Monetary Fund, http://www.imf.org, also has an extensive site, mostly devoted to international macroeconomic issues. Students and instructors will likely find current and back issues of Finance and Development, a joint publication of the World Bank and the IMF, most useful. A number of these articles are listed below. The journal is available from the publications section: http://www.imf.org/external/pubind.htm. Also available at this site are their Working Papers series, which represent the latest research by professional economists at the IMF before this research is formally published. These papers are available as PDF files and are quite technical, suitable for Master's students or above.
- The Harvard Institute for International Development, http://www.hiid.harvard.edu/, also has an extensive list of publications and working papers, most of which can be downloaded for free. These papers are suitable for advanced undergraduates or higher.
- The United Nations' Development Program site, http://www.undp.org/, is less extensive than those listed above, but may be of interest to some students since the United Nation's approach to economic development is somewhat different than that of the World bank or IMF.
- A number of well-regarded professors maintain extensive Web sites with their own writings. For example, Nouriel Roubini's Asian Crisis home page, http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~nroubini/asia/ (click on "Asian Crisis"), has been rated one of the five best economics Web sites by The Economist magazine. This site has an extensive, one might say overwhelming, list of articles ranging from newspaper editorials to academic papers. The site contains an enormous amount of information for anyone interested in macroeconomic development as well as the Asian Crisis.
Paul Krugman, one of the best economists of his generation, also has extensive writings of his own on his site, which is located at: http://www.wws.princeton.edu/~pkrugman/. This site was also rated one of the five best in economics.
- The National Bureau of Economic Research has an extensive array of working papers written by many of the best economists in their fields. These papers are generally written for professional economists, but quite a few are suitable for advanced undergraduates. The papers are available by subscription only (many Universities subscribe) through http://www.nber.org.
- For an even more extensive list of sites available on the Web, see the Development Economics and Economic Development Web site at http://faculty.oxy.edu/gsecondi/dev.html.
News Sources:
- The World Bank offers a Development Forum where students and instructors can exchange ideas on various development topics. The forum is available at http://www.worldbank.org/devforum/.
- The Economist provides a Web subscription service available at http://www.economist.com/ that includes their detailed surveys, many of which relate directly to economic development. There may be a fee to subscribe. Check to see if you can access the magazine through your University library.
- Students and faculty interested in usenet groups may find the following useful: sci.econ.research, sci.econ, alt.politics.economics, as well as Silicon Investor's Asia forum.
