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This chapter offers a rationale for the book which recognizes the importance of entrepreneurs’ contributions to the economic system the “key drivers” of economic progress. It provides definitions of key terms. It also shares an overview of each of the five sections of the work that investigates entrepreneurship policies for and practices of female entrepreneurs in Japan, China, India, Singapore, and Indonesia.

The impact of geography on economic outcomes has traditionally been ignored by economists. Research by scientists and other social scientists, however, has uncovered connections between factors such as climate and ecology, and economic progress. Recently, economists have also begun to examine the existence of this relationship by studying the effects of geography on aggregate levels of economic activity and more specifically on productivity. This chapter summarises the recent literature on this topic and traces the pathways through which these effects take place. The direct influences of geography include factors such as climate, disease ecology, location and natural resources all of which can impart distinct advantages or obstacles to development, as the case may be.

The threads from the previous chapters are tied together to suggest that geography, culture and institutions together play a pivotal role in influencing economic development outcomes. In addition to directly influencing output, geography has proximate effects via culture and institutions. Empirical analyses also verify that aspects of culture affect the quality of institutions and directly influence modern economic development. Since the cultural data used is for preindustrial societies it avoids the reverse influence of economic progress on cultural values. Together the findings help explain the early divergence in standards of living across the world and also why these disparities are persistent. They also suggest that successful policies aimed at improving development outcomes should reflect the geographical constraints and cultural and institutional frameworks in which they are to take effect.

Chapter 4 makes one of the key points of this book: Economic progress is dependent on innovation.

Chapter 3 becomes seriously involved in explaining certain activities which are blocking the economic progress.

While colonial contexts prided themselves in separating the colonized from the colonizer using racial, economic, and geographical boundaries, the new global Empire, disguised under the prospect of economic progress, shatters barriers of such separation and creates desire for a new kind of liberation among Third World countries. This liberation, while promising economic emancipation and racial equality, is contingent upon the voluntary submission to exploitation. At the same time, penetrable borders cause anxiety for the global Empire as it allows for an unsupervised mixing leading to the creation of heterogeneous subjectivities. As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri point out, “The dark side of the consciousness of globalization is the fear of contagion.”1 Contaminated subjects, as a result, become excellent sites for economic opportunity as their hybrid subjectivities make them desirable subjects that at once belong, but not quite, to the new Empire.

The case for asset building as an approach to poverty alleviation dates back more than 20 years, to Michael Sherraden’s Assets and the Poor (1991). As CFED (2013) and numerous others have recognized, Assets and the Poor demanded a sharper focus on the causes of poverty, as well as potential strategies to alleviate it, and made the case for the importance of household assets, including savings, in the achievement of financial stability and economic progress. Emergency savings are just one component of the asset base needed to support financial stability, but they can serve as the foundation for further asset building. Start2Save, a matched emergenc savings program, is designed to help families develop this important foundation.1 The program has the potential to provide low-income families with an opportunity to gain financial preparedness skills while building and maintaining emergency savings, empowering them to create their own safety net.

Chapter 1 describes the tension between the goals of policymakers who seek to make research and development (R&D) a cornerstone of national economic progress and the reality that R&D programs operate in a complex environment where program design and implementation is challenging and success is difficult to measure. The chapter also summarizes how the rest of the book offers insights and tools to improve the opportunities for success in government R&D programs.

It is extremely puzzling that our level of ignorance goes far enough to hurt even those who are against any economic activity to get the mighty American market system going. As has been stated throughout this book, a powerful opposition in Congress is opposed to any kind of economic activity. This group and its supporters are suffering from an acute case of ignorance. They have no idea that they are not only hurting the American economy but are also hurting themselves. Those people who do not want any economic change or economic progress are most likely to be part of a group that will benefit the most from any economic advancement; they should be championing economic progress possibilities. Among many other things, some of which are discussed in this book, infrastructure development is extremely critical for economic well-being and economic progress.

At the beginning of the longitudinal study described in this book Shekuntala’s statement illustrating the preference for sons was widely acknowledged in India. Now, almost four decades later, in a country that has generated phenomenal economic and technological advances, it is useful to reflect on how much has changed. To what extent does Shekuntala’s pronouncement ring true today? In the following pages this question is addressed in the context of rural India by an in depth exploration of factors relating to the desire for sons, including both its motivations and consequences. While previous research has examined these interrelationships at a single moment in time, this study is unique in covering a span of over three decades, 1975 to 2008.2 It presents both qualitative and quantitative data on historical processes and outcomes in a Maharashtra community where impressive economic development has taken place, and analyzes the degree to which gender equality3 is also occurring in the context of economic progress. Before discussing the study in detail, this chapter presents a brief overview of the evolution and development of son preference in Indian culture, and the accompanying decline in women’s position. Previous research on son preference in India, and its influence upon fertility decision-making and outcomes, is then briefly reviewed.

November 2012 will be recalled as a historic month for China because it witnessed the inception of a new leadership for the Chinese Communist Party that would be headed by Xi Jinping, the newly appointed president of China. Xi Jinping’s ascension comes at a time when the country finds itself on the threshold of an impending transition to a more sustainable pattern of economic progress, and although it is too early to infer whether he would have the towering stature of some of his predecessors, Xi’s role is a critical one. Almost every transition is a test of authority, resilience, and dynamism, and for China’s leadership this certainly is the case.

From the findings presented so far, it is evident that, in the face of considerable economic progress in Gove, males remained dominant as principal earners, sources of security for their parents and main inheritors of property, including from their wives upon marriage. In 2008 the preference for boys was less openly expressed than previously. Villagers were aware that family size was declining and that sex ratios had become increasingly skewed in favor of males. The popular concept of an ideal family now consisted of one boy and one girl. Nonetheless, even in 2008, villagers indicated a strong preference for male children, and while girls were not considered a curse, as in some parts of India, couples who had only female children were still considered unfortunate.

The liberation of women from exclusive domesticity did not originate in feminist books, or a war, or a big inflation, although those things did contribute to its progress. The rising enrollment of women in the paid labor forces of the developed world is a straightforward consequence of the industrial revolution of over two hundred years ago. That revolution has produced a long and continuing rise in the productivity of labor in the developed nations of the world. Economic progress has steadily raised the wage for an hour’s labor—the price of human beings’ time. Women have had to sell their time at a cheaper rate than men, and still must do so. But over the decades, the price employers have paid for women’s time has steadily risen along with the price paid for men’s. The key to women’s economic emergence is that their time has risen in price until it has become too valuable to be spent entirely in the home.

The international assistance community has had vast experience with helping underdeveloped, often poverty-stricken countries reconstruct their economies after a period of violent conflict. Some development experience has been highly successful. In Thailand, Taiwan, Botswana, and Turkey, for example, foreign aid contributed significantly (although not without setbacks) to economic progress and modernization. The record of post-conflict assistance also includes some successful cases, such as South Korea, Vietnam, Mozambique, and Uganda, which were designed and implemented beyond the template of the European Marshall Plan.

This book explains how the ever-tightening grip of intellectual property rights threatens to undermine science, economic progress, personal liberty, and democracy. Of course, intellectual property rights are nothing new. They are just a fancy name for patents, copyrights, and trademarks—privileges that have been with us for centuries. But in recent years, intellectual property rights have taken on unprecedented powers. Before I go any further, consider the following examples of the abuses associated with intellectual property.