by Marian Sawer, The Loop
April 13, 2023

By Christian Le Bas, Professor of Economics, ESDES Lyon Business School, Lyon Catholic University, France

Frugal innovation (FI thereafter) has been garnering great research interest in the last two decades. The literature tells us a new frugal product is associated with a substantial reduction in costs compared to a standard product due to the limited number of basic functionalities while having a minimum level of technological and ecological performance. Because its manufacturing cost is also reduced, its price is lower compared to those of more standard products, as a consequence, it can be purchased by consumers with low incomes. Such a new type of innovation provides valuable products for low-income communities contributing to economic inclusion in the process of consumption. FI is therefore, inclusive. This type of new product is more durable, simple, efficient, less technologically sophisticated and costly. In the past, located in emerging countries it is today more “global”, gaining followers in developed economies. In this context, FI shows strong potential to foster inclusion and sustainability effectively.

We show in the book, FI is part of a new technological paradigm. The size of the product is smaller, and the number of functionalities/components is reduced (product therefore easier to recycle). As a consequence, the product is more reliable (it has a longer lifespan) and less technological complex (easier to repair). The core of this new paradigm is therefore design simplification. As a result, there is less pressures on natural resources. It can be manufactured more easily/quickly and therefore saves energy. Consequently, FI is a green (or environmental) innovation. In the current period the frugal product seems to interest consumers who are ecologically virtuous by choice.

FI is without a doubt an innovation of transformative change (Schot and Steinmueller) aligning social and environmental concerns with innovation (for profit) objectives. FI can be considered as a part of the solution to the main problems of the planet (global economic inequalities and climate change).

Technological frugality shares a number of characteristics with the low-tech approach: simplicity in the architecture of the product, the search for (much) less technological complexity, the use of limited resources (including economic resources or R&D), ecological properties (“resources-saving”). But deviates from a low-tech paradigm in what the goal of frugality is not technological, it is to provide affordable goods in terms of price. Technology is just one way to do that. The frugality approach does not refuse (by principle) the use of high-tech technologies in design activities (such as the use of design methods as artificial intelligence) or in the manufacturing of frugal products (like robotics).
Until now, most of the literature addressing FI has been qualitative empirical and the analytical frameworks have come from Management Science. Little attention has been given to understanding the technological core of FI and, more importantly, to the underlying economic mechanisms that are affected by technological frugality. This book aims to fill this gap. For achieving this we rely on a mix of theories linked to the Schumpeterian approach to innovation (Economics of innovation) combining methods from Evolutionary Theory, Microeconomics, and Industrial Organization.

My book The Economics of Frugal Innovation. Technological Change for Inclusion and Sustainability aims to fill this gap. Chapter 1 of the book discusses the various definitions of FI found in the literature and pictures some striking cases of frugal product. In chapter 2 I articulate the notion of technological frugality (the frugal direction of technological change) and the concept of technological paradigm at the core of the innovation studies as an evolutionary research programme. The idea of design simplification resumes this new paradigm. Chapter 3 explores economic topics in relation with the frugal direction of technological change: the resource constraints schemes, a new model of induced innovations and the structure of innovation demand-side approaches. Chapter 4 proposes an analysis showing the positive consequences of the frugal direction of technological change for the environment. Chapter 5 addresses an issue much dealt with in the literature: the relation between technological frugality and sustainability. Because we assume FI is in general sustainable, we explore the relevance of a new taxonomy that sticks more the empirical evidence : weakly sustainable frugal versus fully sustainable frugal. In chapter 6 we fill a gap by delineating en econometric exercise aiming to understand what type of innovators implement FI. Our estimations enable us to retain complex innovator (achieving product and process innovation) are more prone to innovate frugally. Chapter 7 in the literature, we find the idea FI is considered as a disruptive innovation concept due to Christensen. New frugal product staying in the low-end segment of the market cannot be considered as competing standard product and therefore cannot feed a process of disruption. Our starting point in chapter 8 is : can FI a possible determinant of economic growth in LDC. Our pessimistic conclusion is : we do not find any evidence in favour of this assumption.

The novelty of the book lies in presenting the economic mechanisms ruling the design, the implementation, and the diffusion of FI innovation. As such, the book is likely to be of interest to people (academics, experts, various kinds of practitioners) wanting to study new types of technological innovation in relation to sustainability.

The Economics of Frugal Innovation by Christian Le Bas, Professor of Economics, ESDES Lyon Business School, Lyon Catholic University, France is out now.

Read the introduction and other free chapters on Elgaronline

By Raghbendra Jha, Emeritus Professor, Arndt-Corden Department of Economics, Australian National University

Despite some obstacles like the crises of the late 1980s and early 1990s, developing economies, the global economy, and international trade experienced steady growth during the period 1980-2000. It was widely claimed that this was partly the result of the adoption of the doctrine of the globalisation by a large majority of developing countries.

However, things changed dramatically with the food price crisis of 2007.  Quantitative restrictions on food exports were imposed by many countries.  At a philosophical level the importance of supply side effects was underscored at a global level.  This realisation was further reinforced by the Global Financial Crisis of 2008-09 when credit collapse on a global scale led to serious supply side impediments to credit growth.  Expansionary fiscal and monetary policies were put together in many countries and the G-20 group of nations was formed to nurse the global economy back to health. However, this led to the massive pile up of debt – both public and private – in many countries and some of them experienced debt crises as a consequence. It was becoming eminently clear that while demand side policies could be put together quickly, this approach had its limitations and attention to the supply side was essential.

With the large-scale dominance of global supply chains addressing supply side shortcomings would require global effort.  That this was in short supply was quickly made clear during the global COVID pandemic of 2020-22. All countries in the world were faced with an economic challenge and a public health challenge that fed on each other.  Addressing one challenge would exacerbate the other.  Reducing the economic challenge by removing lockdowns and allowing people to go to work would spread the virus further and enforcing lockdowns to slow down the progress of the virus would exacerbate the economic crisis. Developing countries were in a particularly vulnerable position since they had a general paucity of resources to meet the economic and public health challenges and had low capacity to produce vaccines and administer these to their populations.

Other supply side constraints developed soon.  Three illustrations of this would suffice. Public Protective Equipment (PPEs) needed to protect health care professionals who were looking after COVID patients were supplied largely by the country from which the virus emerged- China. China needed PPEs for its own needs and quickly cut off supplies to the rest of the world. When the vaccine was finally produced there was widespread hoarding in some developed countries in order to address their own domestic needs. This was self-defeating in a way because in a globalised world new variants of the virus could develop in under vaccinated populations anywhere in the world. Furthermore, there was (and still is) uncertainty about the efficacy of some of these vaccines. Finally, just as the end of the pandemic was in sight, a ferocious European war between Russia and Ukraine has disrupted supply chains the world over, particularly with respect to food and fuel.  This has fed into the inflationary processes in many individual countries as well as globally.   

Under such circumstances, countries started abandoning the idea of global supply chains and started cultivating more limited supply chains with countries they could rely on.  The importance of supply side policies was writ large all over.

This realisation spilled over onto the area of macroeconomic management.  Expansionary fiscal and monetary policies put in place to stimulate economies during the pandemic and inadequate attention to stimulating the supply side led to the build-up of massive excess demand in many countries. The resulting inflation has persisted well after the worst effects of the pandemic are over.  Interest rates have been raised globally to control this inflation with the result that many economies are slowing down and some of them are facing the threat of a recession. Public and private debt have spiralled in most countries.

Against this background, with the developed countries deeply involved in their own economic affairs, not much attention has been paid to the economies of the developing countries. My book Macroeconomics for Development: Prognosis and Prospects has been put together partly to address this paucity. Chapter 1 of the book places the macroeconomic challenges of economic development in context whereas Chapter 2 outlines widely accepted contours of economic development.  Chapter 3 explores the role of finance and institutions in economic development and Chapter 4 discusses the design of monetary policy.  Chapter 5 discusses the design of fiscal policy for economic development and Chapter 6 considers macroeconomic policy design in open economies.  Chapter 7 articulates two versions of the stochastic general equilibrium model of the macroeconomy – the Ramsey model and the overlapping generations model. Chapter 8 examines the consequences of the pandemic for the developing world and Chapter 9 considers how uncommon macroeconomic policy has been designed during the pandemic.  

The novelty of the book lies in presenting the received theory of macroeconomics for development as well as the particular challenges thrown up by the pandemic. As such, the book is likely to be of interest to students in undergraduate and graduate courses in macroeconomics of economic development as well as to other interested readers.   It is written in relatively non-technical language so that it can appeal to students, scholars and general readers alike.

Macroeconomics for Development by Raghbendra Jha, Emeritus Professor of Economics, Arndt-Corden Department of Economics, Australian National University, Australia is out now.

Read the introduction and other free chapters on Elgaronline

By Richard Wagner, Emeritus Professor of Economics, George Mason University, US

I was pleased when Edward Elgar invited me to contribute a book on public choice theory to its series on “Rethinking Economics.” My entire academic career has taken place inside the corridors of public choice thinking, starting with my 1963 enrollment in the Ph.D. program in economics at the University of Virginia. I enrolled there and not somewhere else after reading James Buchanan’s and Gordon Tullock’s 1962 Calculus of Consent. That reading settled my indecision about whether I would study economics or political science, for reading that book convinced me that I could study both in Virginia’s economics program.

            After my first year at Virginia, moreover, Buchanan and Tullock invited me to attend a conference they were sponsoring in October 1964 in what at the time they were calling “nonmarket decision making.” With weakening memory after nearly 60 years, I no longer recall full details of that conference. Among the 15-20 attendees were such prominent contributors to the early years of public choice as Duncan Black, Anthony Downs, Roland McKean, William Niskanen, Elinor Ostrom, Vincent Ostrom, William Riker, and Thomas Schelling.

            The conferees were united in their dislike of the common practice of using concepts from welfare economics to offer advice to politicians about optimizing one thing or another. It’s not that they were opposed to optimizing in principle, but that they thought that politicians were already quite adept at being politicians, and so didn’t need help from economists. After all, politicians were typically elected repeatedly to their offices, leaving those offices only when they chose to do so. Politicians didn’t need economists to help them to be better politicians.

            The conferees pursued a quite different analytical challenge, which was to uncover the hidden logic that undergirded political action. Politicians were recognized to be at least as rational as ordinary people, only they operated inside a different type of social and institutional environment than did ordinary persons. In this respect, Vilfredo Pareto’s 1915 treatise on Mind and Society distinguished between two major environments that contained human action within society. One of those environments elicited logical action by participants. These were commercial and scientific environments. The other of those environments elicited action that was non-logical, which is different from being irrational. The primary non-logical environments in society were politics and religion.

            Logical environments were primarily environments dominated by direct experiences of costs and gains by participants. Those participants invested in their choices and bore the value consequences of the resultant outcomes. By contrast, non-logical environments were animated by impressions and images. One beautiful illustration of the difference in environments arises in different approaches to the existence of God. Pascal’s Wager pertains to a logical environment with Pascal counseling that the mathematics of infinity explains that a prudent person would choose to believe in God. Alternatively, Anselm’s so-called proof starts with someone who believes in God and counsels people to probe the meaning and significance of that belief in their lives. Applied to politics, this means that people start with feelings to which politicians seek to appeal by crafting images that resonate with those feelings.

            The early public choice theorists confronted the problem of making their ideas intelligible to an economics profession that for a good half-century had become accustomed to using economics to proffer advice to politicians, mainly through the medium of welfare economics. To gain a foothold in that profession, it seemed prudent to proceed by making marginal changes to the prevailing schemes of economic theory. Hence, public choice, which was given its name in only in 1968, embraced the standard postwar assumptions of optimizing individual choice and systemic equilibrium, and proceeded to emend those assumptions to incorporate political phenomena. For instance, William Niskanen published Bureaucracy and Representative Government in 1971. This book treated bureaus within the context of the theory of the firm by modifying the theory of the firm to account for the inability of bureaus to capitalize their profits. It wasn’t that bureaus couldn’t conceivably return profits; it was that their institutional arrangements prevented them from doing so. Instead of returning profits, bureau officials would convert what would have been profits into rents for bureau officials and relevant legislators.

            In my judgment, public choice has become ossified over the course of its life. Rethinking Public Choice seeks to fight that ossification by replacing the orthodox equilibrium framework with one based on such concepts as evolution, complexity, and emergence. Models don’t just help us to see more clearly; they also shape what we see or think we see. Models are not neutral elements that just magnify our thoughts. To the contrary, they carry our thinking in particular directions. In this respect, equilibrium models are rendered in the passive voice.

            In contrast, Rethinking Public Choice is rendered in the active voice. Everything that happens occurs because of actions people undertake somewhere within a social system. There is, moreover, no such thing as acting on a social system. All action occurs inside a social system, and with that system’s architecture continually changing in response to those actions. A central bank, for instance, does not control a price level. It instructs brokerage houses to buy private assets, which sets in motion transactions that bring about changes in asset holdings throughout the social system, including changes throughout the structure of prices.

            Rethinking Public Choice ranges widely throughout the material that public choice theorists have addressed, always seeking to explore alternative insights that arise through this emphasis on active voice theorizing where human population systems feature dense collections of people always acting, and with much of what those actions accomplish being unintended by-products of human interaction within complex social systems. In this respect, Rethinking Public Choice looks to the Scottish Enlightenment and not to post-war welfare economics for its animating scholarly inspiration, only integrating those insights of old with such new schemes of thought as evolution, complexity, emergence, and some dialectics of constituting social order.

Rethinking Public Choice, by Richard E. Wagner, George Mason University, US is out now.

Read the introduction and other free chapters on Elgaronline

Written by Dr Neil Thompson, independent writer, educator and adviser and a visiting professor at the Open University. His website, with his acclaimed Manifesto for Making a Difference, is at www.NeilThompson.info.

I have been involved in teaching social work for over 30 years. To begin with, the majority of students were mature students who generally had some direct experience in the social work world (as social work assistants, care workers or foster carers, for example). It could be assumed, then, that we did not need to teach them about what social work is.

Over the years, though, the student demographic has changed considerably. We now have a greater proportion of younger students, many of whom have little or no experience in the field. Much of the early teaching therefore needs to focus on the nature and purposes of social work in order to establish a common baseline of understanding. This is necessary because a significant proportion of the general public have little or no idea of what social work is or what social workers actually do.

In my experience, misconceptions are more common than a genuine understanding of what is involved in the day-to-day work of social work teams up and down the country. Media distortions play a big part in this, reinforcing stereotypes of child care social workers as child snatchers (rather than highly skilled professionals who work extremely hard to keep families together while protecting children and safeguarding their health, education and welfare). Removing a child is, of course, a last resort.
Social workers in other fields of practice are generally invisible, in the sense that, unless you are professionally involved or you have had direct experience of being on the receiving end of social work support, the chances are you will have little more than a vague inkling of what social work is all about.

This low level of understanding (or high level of misunderstanding) is also to be found among fellow professionals at times, and so social workers will often have to clarify and negotiate their role before they can get down to the actual business of their work (for example, convincing GPs who issue instructions rather than make interprofessional referrals that social workers are obliged to make their own holistic assessment based on engaging with the individual or family concerned). I once had an elderly woman give me a referral letter from her GP and tell me that it was a ‘prescription’ for a place in a care home. It turned out, following a social work assessment, that all that was needed was a light package of support services – she was nowhere near the criteria for admission to residential care.

Social work is highly complex and demanding (if a problem is simple or straightforward, it is unlikely that it would find its way to a busy social worker’s desk, as they are likely to be up to their eyes with more high-profile cases with higher levels of risk). It is often poorly understood – even by people who should know better; largely underfunded (consider the longstanding concerns about the NHS experiencing difficulties because of the shortage of much-needed social care provision); and currently subject to major recruitment and retention problems (austerity measures have increased demand while decreasing supply, making the job unmanageable much of the time). These challenges then, of course, make teaching social work very challenging too. Successfully preparing students for all that they will face in the ‘real world’ of social work is no mean feat.

But, despite all these pressures and challenges, social work remains a popular choice for students who recognize that the pressures are largely counterbalanced by the rewards of the job – making a positive difference to the lives of some of the most vulnerable people in some of our most disadvantaged communities and promoting social justice.

Given the complexities and dilemmas that are part and parcel of social work, effective teaching needs to be much more than conventional talk and chalk (or the death by PowerPoint equivalent). I have been fortunate in my teaching career to have worked alongside some very creative and inspiring teachers. So, when it came to writing my Teaching Social Work book, I was privileged to be able to draw on what I had learned from such gifted educators, while also adding many ideas of my own developed over many years.

Despite the tabloid media’s predilection for distorting social work and for highlighting and exaggerating the small minority of cases that go wrong, social work is a major force for good, helping to make our society a humane, caring and inclusive one. By its very nature it is challenging and demanding, and so effective and safe practice relies on high-quality educational experiences. There is no easy, formula way to ensure such experiences, but what Teaching Social Work offers is a foundation of ideas, exercises and approaches that can help students engage with the professional knowledge base that can guide them in all their endeavours.

Teaching Social Work
is available to purchase now.

Neil Thompson, Independent writer, educator and adviser and visiting professor at the Open University, UK

Read a sample chapter on Elgaronline.