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Some Recent Literature on Development
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 November 2008
Extract
It was possible in this Journal more than a decade ago to attempt a fairly comprehensive assessment of contemporary development literature.1 That review article referred to a number of emerging themes, associated with such major figures as Prebisch, Myrdal, Hirschmann, Nurske, Singer, Perroux, de Bernis, and others, including relations between the centre and the periphery, ‘backwash’ effects, regional cooperation, growth points, balanced and unbalanced growth, linkage effects, and the strategy for industrialisation. These themes continue to be discussed during the 1970s, and if there seem to be fewer new ‘concepts’ there has been a significant shift in emphasis. The sheer number of works written, more and more by those with first-hand knowledge of the developing world, now demands a highly selective approach. But equally important it is appropriate to concentrate mainly on those recent publications which dwell upon the major topics being debated by Third-World leaders and economists. Accordingly the present article reviews a selection of the literature which has appeared during the last five or six years concerned with two important interrelated areas: (i) growth, equality, and employment, including rural development, and (ii) the transfer and development of technology.
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References
page 457 note 1 Ewing, Arthur, ‘Some Recent Contributions to the Literature on Economic Development’, in The Journal of Modern African Studies (Cambridge), IV, 3, 09 1966, pp. 335–48.Google Scholar
page 457 note 2 Cf. Ewing, ibid. VII, I, April 1969, pp. 165–8.
page 460 note 1 Stewart, Frances, ‘Capital Goods in Developing Countries’, in Cairncross, A. and Pun, M. (eds.), Employment Income Distribution and Development Strategy: problems of development strategy (London, Macmillan, 1976)Google Scholar, suggests that the build up of capital-goods industries on the lines of the Soviet Union is rarely justified, because the assumptions underlying this model seldom apply. This could be debated, but what cannot be challenged is ‘that a capital goods sector is an essential condition for local technological development, and that without such development LDC's are forced to accept the technical changes of the advanced countries, with deleterious consequences for the rate and pattern of development’ (p. 136).
page 469 note 1 Hans Singer writes in Cairncross and Puri, op. cit. p. 5: ‘I think now that a lot of earlier discussion about the inferiority of primary commodities in relation to manufactured goods, the superiority of import-substitution over export promotion of primary and processed products or simple manufactures – all these were dead ends, or at best poor proxies for the consequences of technological lopsidedness in the present world’.
page 470 note 1 See Streeten, Paul, ‘Technology Gaps between Rich and Poor Countries’, in Scottish Journal of Political Economy (Glasgow), 11 1972.Google Scholar
page 472 note 1 Stewart, Frances, ‘Trade and Technology’ in Streeten, Paul (ed.), Trade Strategies for Development (London, 1973), p. 239.Google Scholar Stewart is also the originator of the concept of ‘consumption technology’, i.e. the physical and other properties of goods in relation to the needs they satisfy and thus the way in which technologies provided by the industrialised countries, largely through transnational corporations, are the vehicle for inappropriate consumption patterns in developing countries; see her ‘Technology and Employment in LDC's’, in World Development (Oxford), March 1974.
page 476 note 1 There is no contradiction between this eulogy of the package and U.N.C.T.A.D.'s insistence on unpackaging: it is simply a question of the side of the fence from which the thick brown paper and knotted string are examined.
page 480 note 1 The New International Economic Order is being discussed in many forms, particularly in the United Nations, although the debate is still at a general or conceptual level. But see Patel, Surendra J., ‘Collective Self-Reliance of Developing Countries’, in The Journal of Modern African Studies, XIII, 4, 12 1975, pp. 569–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar