The field of development economics is concerned with the causes of underdevelopment and with policies that may accelerate the rate of growth of per capita income.【F1】
While these two concerns are related to each other, it is possible to devise policies that are likely to accelerate growth without fully understanding the causes of underdevelopment.
Studies of both the causes of underdevelopment and of policies and actions that may accelerate development are undertaken for a variety of reasons.【F2】
There are those who are concerned with the developing countries on humanitarian grounds; that is, with the problem of helping the people of these countries to attain certain minimum material standards of living in terms of such factors as food, clothing, shelter, and nutrition.
For them, low per capita income is the measure of the problem of poverty in a material sense. The aim of economic development is to improve the material standards of living by raising the absolute level of per capita incomes. Raising per capita incomes is also a staled objective of policy of the governments of all developing countries. For policymakers and economists attempting to achieve their governments " objectives, therefore, an understanding of economic development, especially in its policy dimensions, is important.【F3】
Finally, there are those who are concerned with economic development either because they believe it is what people in developing countries want or because they believe that political stability can be assured only with satisfactory rates of economic growth.
These motives are not mutually exclusive.
Those who are concerned with political stability tend to see the low per capita incomes of the developing countries in relative terms; that is, in relation to the high per capita incomes of the developed countries.【F4】
For them, even if a developing country is able to improve its material standards of living through a rise in the level of its per capita income, it may still be faced with the more intractable subjective problem of the discontent created by the widening gap in the relative levels between itself and the richer countries.
【F5】
Although there was once in development economics a debate as to whether raising living standards or reducing the relative gap in living standards was the true desideratum of policy, experience during the 1960-80 period convinced most observers that developing countries could, with appropriate policies, achieve sufficiently high rates of growth both to raise their living standards fairly rapidly and to begin closing the gap.