V. A. MELYANTSEV. DEVELOPED AND DEVELOPING COUNTRIES IN AN ERA OF CHANGE. (Comparative assessment of the efficiency of growth in the 1980s-2000s). Moscow: Publishing House "Klyuch-S", 2009. 216 p. The question for orientalists is probably more acute than for other social scientists: should they delve into the details of the life of Eastern countries in their research or, using the rich variety of models and factors of development that exist in the East, should they strive for generalizations resulting from an analysis of the realities of specific countries? The book under review is the second answer to this question. Moreover, the book essentially presents an analysis of world economic development in the period that is called the era of globalization. The modern world economy is characterized by a great variety and inconsistency of processes that confirm a variety of theories and views. The strong point of V. A. Melyantsev's book is the lack of bias. The author objectively reflects the complexity of the modern world economy, without trying to single out something that can be called the main thing, and on this build a simplified picture of the world. Its use of regression analysis as a tool for assessing the strength of links between economic indicators is a test for the significance of certain processes, and not all the hypotheses initially formulated, for example, about the relationship between population dynamics and per capita GDP in developing countries (p. 188, page 2), are confirmed. The advantage of the book is the abundance of well-selected statistical materials (almost no position of the author "hangs" as a certain hypothesis, not confirmed by well-processed tables and graphs) and footnotes, conveniently located for the reader on a page by page basis. It seems that this is largely due to the fact that the author used regression analysis in his work, which, in addition to quantitative estimates of relationships, provides filtering of information, highlightin ... Read more