Economic Development from the Perspective of Evolutionary Economic Theory

This paper proposes that economic development can fruitfully be understood as an evolutionary process, in the sense that it involves the introduction to the economy of many new ways of doing things, a good portion of which fail, with the ones that survive providing the basis for the next round of evolutionary change. The process is Schumpererian rather than neoclassical. The fact that economic development is evolutionary has many important policy implications.