The New Development Economics as a Methodological and Ideological Discipline

Abstract

The article is devoted to the description of a fundamentally new configuration of the discipline "Development Economics", offered as a theoretical understanding of modern transformation processes in the world economy. The discipline is designed for master's programs of economic directions of training, although it is built on the basis of an interdisciplinary approach. It is shown that the traditional courses on development economics, formed in the West in recent decades, were aimed at explaining the economic backwardness of developing countries and developing recommendations for overcoming the lag in the framework of globalization logic of the world economy development. The problems of developing countries and recipes for economic modernization have been presented in the format of macroeconomic models and institutional explanatory schemes, which do not reflect the much deeper causes of underdevelopment. At the beginning of the 21st century, the topics of Western courses were supplemented with global challenges of human development – inequality and poverty, environmental pollution, the UN Sustainable Development Goals, the "green agenda", and so on. However, these problems are also treated within the framework of the devalued globalist agenda. The ongoing deglobalization and the search for a new world economic order have devalued the theoretical background of traditional development economics. In the proposed new discipline, the problem of modern economic development is revealed with the help of geographical, geo-economic, long-term technological, institutional factors, with the involvement of the latest research in the framework of economic theory and related scientific directions of both domestic and foreign authors. The authors propose a competitive non-equilibrium paradigm of economic processes as the basic ontological concept of the course, in contrast to the implicitly existing equilibrium paradigm in the standard versions of the course "Development Economics".