Theories of Development: A Comparative Analysis

1 Theories of development : A Comparative AnalysisIt matters little how much information we possess about development if we have not grasped its inner Goulet, The Cruel ChoiceDevelopment must be redefined as an attack on the chief evils of the world today: malnutrition, disease, illiteracy, slums,unemployment and inequality. Measured in terms of aggregate growth rates, development has been a great success. Butmeasured in terms of jobs, justice and the elimination of poverty, it has been a failure or only a partial P. Streeten, Director,World development InstituteGone are the early naive illusions of development as an endeavor in social engineering toward a brave new world. Multiplegoals have now replaced the initial single focus. There is now a greater understanding of the profound interaction betweeninternational and national factors in the development process and an increasing emphasis on human beings and the humanpotential as the basis, the means, and the ultimate purpose of the development , Former President,United Nations University, TokyoEvery nation strives after development .

2 Economic progress is an essential component, but it is not the onlycomponent. As we discovered in Chapter I, development is not purely an economic phenomenon. In an ultimatesense, it must encompass more than the material and financial side of people's lives. development shouldtherefore be perceived as a multidimensional process reorganization and reorientation of entire economic and social systems. I addition to improvements inincomes and output, it typically involves radical changes in institutional, social, and administrative structures aswell as in popular attitudes and, in many cases, even customs and beliefs. Finally, although development isusually defined in a national context, its widespread realization may necessitate fundamental modification of theinternational economic and social system as this chapter, we explore the recent historical and intellectual evolution in scholarly thinking about how andwhy development does or does not take place We do this by examining four major and often competingdevelopment Theories .

3 In addition to presenting these differing approaches and an emerging new one we willdiscover how each offers valuable insight and a useful perspective on the nature of the development Theories of Economic development : Four ApproachesThe post-World War II literature on economic development has been dominated by four major and sometimescompeting strands of thought: (1) the linear stages-of-growth model, (2) Theories and patterns of structuralchange, (3) the international dependence revolution, and (4) the neoclassical, free-market counterrevolution. Inaddition, the past few years have witnessed the beginnings of a potential fifth approach associated primarily withthe so-called new theory of economic of the 1950s and early 1960s viewed the process of development as a series of successive stages ofeconomic growth through which all countries must pass.

4 It was primarily an economic theory of development inwhich the right quantity and mixture of saving, investment, and foreign aid were all that was necessary to enableThird World nations to proceed along an economic growth path that historically had been followed by the moredeveloped countries. development thus became synonymous with rapid, aggregate economic linear-stages approach was largely replaced in the 1970s by two competing economic (and indeedideological) schools of thought. The first, which focused on Theories and patters of structural change, usedmodern economic theory and statistical Analysis in an attempt to portray the internal process of structural changethat a "typical" developing country must undergo if it is to succeed in generating and sustaining a process ofrapid economic growth. The second, the international dependence revolution, was more radical and political inorientation.

5 It viewed underdevelopment in terms of international and domestic power relationships, institutionaland structural economic rigidities, and the resulting proliferation of dual economies and dual societies bothwithin and among the nations of the world. Dependence Theories tended to emphasize external and internalinstitutional and political constraints on economic development . Emphasis was placed on the need for major newpolicies to eradicate poverty, to diversified employment opportunities, and to reduce income inequalities. These and other egalitarianobjectives were to be achieved within the context of a growing economy, but economic growth per se was notgiven the exalted status accorded to it by the linear-stages and the structural-change much of the 1980s, a fourth approach prevailed. This neoclassical counterrevolution in economicthought emphasized the beneficial role of free markets, open economies, and the privatization of inefficient andwasteful public enterprises.

6 Failure to develop, according to this theory, is not due to exploitive external andinternal forces as expounded by dependence theorists. Rather, it is primarily the result of too much governmentintervention and regulation of the , in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a few neoclassical and institutional economists began to develop whatmay emerge as a fifth approach, called the new growth theory. It attempts to modify and extend traditionalgrowth theory in a way that helps explain why some countries develop rapidly while others stagnate and why,even in a neoclassical world of private markets, governments may still have an important role to play in thedevelopment process. We now look at each of these alternative approaches in greater Linear-Stages TheoryWhen interest in the poor nations of the world really began to materialize following the Second World War,economists in the industrialized nations were caught off guard.

7 They had no readily available conceptualapparatus with which to analyze the process of economic growth in largely peasant, agrarian societiescharacterized by the virtual absence of modern economic structures. But they did have the recent experience ofthe Marshall Plan in which massive amounts of financial and technical assistance enabled the war-torncountries of Europe to rebuild and modernize their economies in a matter of a few years. Moreover, was it nottrue that all modern industrial nations were once undeveloped peasant agrarian societies? Surely their historicalexperience in transforming their economies from poor agricultural subsistence societies to modern industrialgiants had important lessons for the "backward" countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The logic andsimplicity of these two strands of thought the utility of massive injections of capital and the historical patternof the now developed countries was too irresistible to be refuted by scholars, politicians, and administrators inrich countries to whom people and ways of life in the Third World were often no more real than statistics orscattered chapters in anthropology 's Stages of GrowthOut of this somewhat sterile intellectual environment, fueled by the cold war politics of the 1950s and 1960s andthe resulting competition for the allegiance of newly independent nations, came the stages-of-growth model Its most influential and outspoken advocate was the American economic historian Walt W.

8 To the Rostow doctrine, the transition from underdevelopment to development can be described interms of a series of steps or stages through which all countries must proceed. As Professor Rostow wrote in theopening chapter of his Stages of Economic Growth:This book presents an economic historian's way of generalizing the sweep of modern history.. It ispossible to identify all societies, in their economic dimensions, as lying within one of five categories: thetraditional society, the pre-conditions for take-off into self-sustaining growth, the take-off, the drive tomaturity, and the age of high mass consumption.. These stages are not merely descriptive. They are notmerely a way of generalizing certain factual observations about the sequence of development of modernsocieties. They have an inner logic and continuity.

9 They constitute, in the end, both a theory abouteconomic growth and a more general, if still highly partial, theory about modern history as a advanced countries, it was argued, had all passed the stage of "take-off into self-sustaining growth," and theunderdeveloped countries that were still in either the traditional society or the "preconditions" stage had only tofollow a certain set of rules of development to take off in their turn into self-sustaining economic of the principal tricks of development necessary for any takeoff was the mobilization of domestic andforeign saving in order to generate sufficient investment to accelerate economic growth. The economicmechanism by which more investment leads to more growth can be described in terms of the Harrod-Domargrowth Harrod-Domar Growth ModelEvery economy must save a certain proportion of its national income, if only to replace worn-out or impairedcapital goods (buildings, equipment, and materials).

10 However, in order to grow, new investments representingnet additions to the capital stock are necessary. If we assume that there is some direct economic relationshipbetween the size of the total capital stock, K, and total GNP, Y for example, if $3 of capital is always necessaryto produce a $1 stream of GNP it follows that any net additions to the capital stock in the form of newinvestment will bring about corresponding increases in the flow of national output, that this relationship, known in economics as the capital-output ratio, is roughly 3 to 1. If we definethe capital-output ratio as k and assume further that the national savings ratio, s, is a fixed proportion of nationaloutput ( , 6%) and that total new investment is determined by the level of total savings, we can construct thefollowing simple model of economic Saving (S) is some proportion, s, of national income (Y) such that we have the simple equationS = sY( )2.