CHAPTER ONE
- INTRODUCTION
- BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY
Over the past two decades, world output has been expanding and many countries are benefiting from increased cross-border trade and investments. Many others suffer because economic regimes are inefficiently managed, and this weakness reduces their capacity to successfully compete globally (Schneider & Enste, 2002).
According to Abubakar (2001) economics is essentially the study of a process we find in all human societies – the economic problem. “It is simply the process of providing for the material and well being of society.” (Anya 2001) Thus, economic history focuses on the central problem of survival and how mankind has solved that problem. Man, generally, is an economic animal who is constantly engaged in activities that would improve his economic situation Mittleman (2000). The countries of the globe have faced the challenges of improving the economic realities in their domains over time. These challenges have been seen in the development realm.
Development can be understood from the point of continued advancement of man towards good living standards.
Modern concept of development has its roots from the emergence of industrialization in Western Europe in the mid 18th century. By 1945, after World War II, scholarly interest in development economics heightened. This made it possible to explore the economic conditions / development levels among nations on the globe. Thus, scholars were able to establish that economic development is not even world over. Other countries or societies are more developed than others. At first, scholars looked at macro-economic issues in determining the development of societies;
however, as time went on, in the 1980s, scholars approached in assessing the development level of a society shifted to micro-economic issues. Thus, the human development index, which basically is concerned with individual‟s poverty levels, became a major concern of development scholars, wishing to determine the level of development of individual societies on the globe (Ninsin, 2000)