Customer Reviews

An Inquiry into Well-Being and Destitution

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This book may not be as well-known and widely studied in graduate programs as, say, Deaton's "The analysis of household surveys" or Bardhan and Udry's "Development microeconomics", but it's an excellent book nonetheless. Professor Dasgupta writes uncommonly well, and despite the sometimes technical nature of the material, large sections of this book flow so naturally that the book often feels more like a collection of essays rather than a textbook.

The only drawback of this book is that at the time of writing (2010) it is already about 15 years old. Micro-development economics has seen remarkable progress since then. Also, the topics covered are somewhat selected and there is much focus on material which is now not as "popular" as it used to be. But every author needs to make choices, after all, so this is not really a drawback after all. Rather, it's something you need to keep in mind if you want to build a library spanning most central topics in micro-development economics nowadays. If that is what you want to do, then I would add to this book Deaton and Bardhan & Udry (see above) and Volumes I, III and IV of the Handbooks of Development Economics (Elsevier). Keep in mind that the Handbook volumes are very expensive and if you google hard enough on the web you can find several chapters online for free.

Going back to the book, now, I fully agree with another reviewer about 1. the impressive bibliography (which takes pages 546-625!!) and 2. the fact that the section on nutrition/malnutrition is wonderful. I would also add that the sections on gender (especially those that focus on India) and those that cover the literature on intra-household allocation of resources are excellent as well. The latter sections, however, are "old" enough that many of the most recent development are not covered (in particular, all the wonderful literature born out of the work by Chiappori and coauthors).

Anyway, overall an unusual and wonderful textbook, highly recommended for someone who wants to do research in development economics. Keep in mind that if you do not have at least a solid college major in economics many parts of this book will be very hard to follow. Although the book is less formal and technical than most graduate textbooks, many pages remain devoted to the discussion of math-intensive models. Of course, all the material should be completely accessible to anyone with (or in the process of getting) a PhD in economics.