Economic Policies for Development: Beyond the Millennium Goals

The promotion of economic development is a recurrent area of interest, both in the policy ground as well as in the academic arena. Developed and developing countries are aware that there are pending issues to be solved. Trying to offer a response to some of them, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) or the 2030 Agenda of the United Nations balance social, economic and environmental factors which are in turn the pillars for sustainable economic growth. In this context, social changes, innovations, and technological advances would play a crucial role. But the needed changes require adequate economic policies aimed to promote sustainable economic development. Joint to this, the past financial and economic crisis has questioned the usefulness of several paradigms accepted by the academy and has also favored the research on economic policies. In the current globalized world, the new approaches to conduct economic policies, and the practical lessons that emerge from empirical analysis, are revealed as necessary tools to understand international economic relations. In this book, we provide some contributions that show the most recent approaches showing to which extent economic policies would overcome a sustainable economic development. First, we will review the current situation and the perspectives of development theories and policies. Next, we will show the scope of both demand-side and supply-side policies, when trying to achieve economic development. Finally, we will show several examples of how developing countries from the Latin America area are dealing with the current situation after the economic crisis, in light of the Sustainable Development Goals. Our results provide a vast and comprehensive analysis of the situation, the perspective and the proposals for the future of the economic policies for development.