Showing papers on "Underdevelopment published in 1997"

The Economics of Industrial Innovation - 3rd Edition

Abstract: Technical innovation has moved to center stage in contemporary debates on economic theory and policy, and Chris Freeman and Luc Soete have played a prominent part in these debates. For this new edition of The Economics of Industrial Innovation, they have rewritten all the existing chapters and added ten new ones that address recent advances in theory and in policymaking. In the new chapters they deal with the international dimensions of technical change including underdevelopment, technology transfer, international trade, and globalization. They have also strengthened the historical account of the rise of new technologies, a main feature of earlier editions. They take advantage of their experience on projects for the OECD, the European Union, and industry in other new chapters on "The Information Society" and on environmental issues, as well as in the updated discussion of science and technology policy.

The process of economic development

Abstract: Part 1: An Overview of Economic Development 1. The Development Imperative 2.Measuring Economic Growth and Development 3. Development in Historical Perspective Part 2: Theories of Development and Underdevelopment 4. Classical and Neoclassical Theories 5. Developmentalist Theories of Economic Development 6. Heterodox Theories of Economic Development Part 3: Structural Transformation 7. The State as a Potential Agent of Transformation 8. Endogenous Growth Theories and New Strategies for Development 9. The Initial Structural Transformation: the Industrialization Process 10. Strategy Switching and Industrial Transformation 11. Agriculture and Development 12. Population, Education and Human Capital 13. Technology and Development Part 4: Problems and Issues 14. Transnational Corporations and Economic Development 15. Macroeconomic Equilibrium: the Internal Balance 16. Macroeconomic Equilibrium: the External Balance 17. The Debt Problem and Development 18. International Institutional Linkages: the IMF, World Bank and Foreign Aid

Society, State and Market: A Guide to Competing Theories of Development

Abstract: * Preface * Part 1: Introduction * 1 Development Studies as a subject area * 2 The theoretical heritage and controversial issues in development research * 3 Conceptions and dimensions of development * Part 2: Economic Development and Underdevelopment * 4 Major theoretical currents in development economics * 5 Theories of growth and modernisation * 6 Structuralist theories and industrial development * 7 Neo-Marxist theories of underdevelopment and dependency * 8 Modes of production and social classes * 9 The international division of labour and transnational corporations * 10 Focus on agricultural development * 11 Development with limited natural resources * Part 3: Third World Politics and the State * 12 Political development and state building * 13 The political heritage and forms of regime * 14 Social forces and forms of regime * 15 Decentralisation and local-level politics * Part 4: The State and Socio-Economic Development * 16 The state and the development process * 17 The political economy of development * 18 State or market? * 19 Development and security * Part V: Civil Society and the Development Process * 20 Dimensions of alternative development * 21 Poverty and social development * 22 The political economy of civil society * 23 Ethnic identities, nationality and conflict * 24 People-managed development * Part VI: Theory Construction in Development Research * 25 A critical assessment of development theories

The Progress of Experiment: Science and Therapeutic Reform in the United States, 1900–1990

Abstract: Part I Of Institutions and Character: The Era of Organisational Reform: 1 A rational therapeutics 2 Memories of underdevelopment: therapeutic research in the US 1900-1935 3 Playing it safe: the federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act of 1938 4 War and Peace Part II Of Statistics and Institutions, or the Triumph of Method: 5 Managing chance 6 You gotta have heart 7 Anatomy of a controversy: the University Group Diabetes Program study 8 The dreams of reason

The Effect of Religion on Economic Development: A Cross National Study of 63 Former Colonies

Abstract: I. INTRODUCTION Latin America's failure to develop and prosper, especially in comparison with her northern neighbors, has frequently led scholars to speculate about the political and socio-economic reasons behind the region's underdevelopment. The consensus in the literature has been that the Spanish-speaking countries inherited characteristics of Spain, characteristics which are not especially conducive to growth and development'. Many have argued that these traits emanate from Catholicism, a dominant cultural force in most Spanish-speaking countries. Since Weber (1930) wrote about the relationship between Protestantism and economic development, many social scientists have noted a negative correlation between Catholieism and economic progress^. However, little of the literature on religion and growth has been subjected to empirical testing. This paper seeks to fill that gap by testing whether Protestantism is positively related to economic growth and development and whether religion can help to explain why Spanish ex-colonies perform markedly worse than their British

The Economics of Industrial Innovation, 3rd Edition

Abstract: Technical innovation has moved to center stage in contemporary debates on economic theory and policy, and Chris Freeman and Luc Soete have played a prominent part in these debates. For this new edition of The Economics of Industrial Innovation, they have rewritten all the existing chapters and added ten new ones that address recent advances in theory and in policymaking. In the new chapters they deal with the international dimensions of technical change including underdevelopment, technology transfer, international trade, and globalization. They have also strengthened the historical account of the rise of new technologies, a main feature of earlier editions. They take advantage of their experience on projects for the OECD, the European Union, and industry in other new chapters on "The Information Society" and on environmental issues, as well as in the updated discussion of science and technology policy.

Islam and Underdevelopment: An Old Puzzle Revisited

Abstract: The world's predominantly Muslim countries have long been underdeveloped. This paper classifies, critiques, and extends the mechanisms that have been proposed as explanations for the pattern. One mechanism involves the use of Islam to legitimize worldviews that served vested interests. Another emphasizes religious obstacles to free thinking and innovation. And still another focuses on communalist norms that dampened incentives to develop capitalist economic institutions. None of these explanations elucidates why groups without any stake in the impediments to growth failed to bring about major reforms. The missing element is the role of public discourse in keeping individuals from questioning, even noticing, social inefficiencies.

Structural Adjustment Programmes and the City in Tropical Africa

Abstract: Following a preface which indicates the alteration in the forces shaping the African city, it is indicated how the conditionalities imposed by structural adjustment programmes initially relate to the national economy. However, they also result in a second round of impacts which, in effect, reshape the city. These operate primarily with the removal of the operation of 'urban bias'; they are reflected in reduced urban growth rates and a mounting informal sector as the overall economy changes and the nature of industry is revised. Meanwhile, underdevelopment occurs as the quality of life declines, inequality mounts and the food supply experiences difficulty. At the same time, money and people depart. It is concluded that such programmes are but reflections of the operation of the global economy.

Observations on the Use of Law by Russian Enterprises

Abstract: Four specialists on the Russian economy analyze the extent to which enterprises use law and legal institutions in structuring exchange relations. The analysis uses the responses from questionnaires administered to sixty officials of fifteen enterprises in Moscow and Yekaterinburg during May-June 1996, supplemented by interviews in enterprises and within arbitrazh courts. Their results indicate that enterprises make little use of law and consider legal institutions to be ineffective. Other than ties based on historic business relations, there is an absence of social and economic networks that might function as substitutes for law. The underdevelopment of institutions to foster impersonal relations between firms slows restructuring and growth. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: P51, P11, K1.

The World Economy: Resources, Location, Trade and Development

Abstract: 1 Introduction 2 The Historical Development of Capitalism 3 Population 4 Resources and Environment 5 Theoretical Considerations 6 Agriculture 7 Manufacturing 8 Services 9 Transportation and Communications 10 Cities and Urban Economies 11 Consumption 12 International Trade and Investment 13 International Trade Patterns 14 Development and Underdevelopment in the Developing World

Race and Social Welfare Policy: The Social Security Act of 1935

Abstract: Recent years have seen an outpouring of scholarship devoted to the origins of United States social policy, much of it focusing on the alleged underdevelopment and bifurcated character of the America welfare state. One group of social scientists has developed what Theda Skocpol calls a "politycentered" approach, according to which the policy decisions and institutional legacies of one era condition and constrain subsequent policy making.' A second group of scholars has highlighted the role that gender distinctions, and challenges to those distinctions, played in shaping welfare innovations and backlashes during the formative years of the welfare state.2 And a third cluster of social scientists has pioneered an approach that centers on the racial politics of welfare.' It is with this third group that the present article is concerned. That the politics of race and the politics of welfare are intertwined in contemporary America is incontestable, and it is equally apparent that their interrelationship today has to be understood in historical context. Scholars such as the sociologist Jill Quadagno

Access to Schooling in a Post-Apartheid South Africa: Linking Concepts to Context

Abstract: This paper focuses on the policy issue of expanding schooling in a post-apartheid South Africa. The Project of placing about two million children of school-going age in school is viewed as central to the rebuilding of South Africa. The paper argues that this project should be located within the peculiar history of this country's educational underdevelopment. Challenging the constraining influence of the New Right context should be central in conceptualising the provision of expanded school access. Access policy should be based on a notion of educational development that is linked to the overall socioeconomic development of this society. The view is promoted in this paper that a policy of quantitative expansion of schooling should not ignore the quality of such schooling.

Ethiopia in change : peasantry, nationalism and democracy

Abstract: Looking back - into the future mutation of statehood and contemporary politics in Ethiopia from progressive to reactionary Eritrea - evolution towards independence and beyond an important root of the Ethiopian revolution - the student movement reflections on Ethiopian underdevelopment - problems and prospects new economic policies and rural development options in the 1990s designing structural adjustment options for Ethiopia - reconstruction, rehabilitation and long-term transformation small urban centres and their role in rural restructuring environmental degradation, population movement and war in Ethiopia neither fast nor famine - prospects for food security in Ethiopia local democracy and central control ethnic factors in post-Megistu Ethiopia the unquiet countryside - the collapse of socialism and rural agitations in Ethiopia, 1990 and 1991 the end of crises? or crises without end?.

Economic Nationalism And Development: Central And Eastern Europe Between The Two World Wars

Abstract: Introduction Economic Nationalism: Description Theoretical and Research Approaches Economic Nationalism: Overview, Sources, and Causes Directions and Instruments of Economic Nationalism Tentative Conclusions Protectionism As A Response To Underdevelopment On Protectionisms Theory and Practice Policy of Protectionism in East and Central Europe: Overview Protectionism in the Region: The Experience of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria Recapitulation and Conclusions Epilogue: Questions for Discussion, Hypotheses, and Summary.

The Health Predicament of The U.S.­Associated Pacific Islands: What Role for Primary Health Care?

Abstract: PURPOSE OF THE PAPER. The purpose of this paper is to provide a perspective on the evolution and development of the health systems in the U.S.­Associated Pacfic Islands and how that development has adversely impacted the health status of the peoples of these areas. SUMMARIES OF METHODS UTILIZED. The authors have reveiwed documents pertaining to the health system from these areas, as well as the published literature. In addition, both authors have lived and worked in the U.S.­Associated Pacific Islands and draw from their experience and observations. PRINCIPAL FINDINGS. Features of the U.S. medical model that have been adopted in the Pacific Islands are an emphasis on curative medicine, recourse to outside referral, and displacement of the responsibility for health away from the individual. The resulting problems include the following: the diseases of underdevelopment co­exist with those of development. Benefits are felt by only a small proportion of the populace. Costs rise as inappropriate technology is applied. The situation fosters unrealistic expectations and dependency. KEY WORDS. Pacific Islander, health status, dependency, primary health care

The law of value and the analysis of underdevelopment

Abstract: Karl Marx entitled his first major work on the theory of capitalism an Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy, not, it should be stressed, An Introduction to … Political Economy. The inclusion of the crucial ‘the critique of provides the key to Marx's break with classical political economy. As much as he respected the contribution of bourgeois writers, especially Ricardo, he did not consider himself a radical member of the political economy school. That the political economy school's most outstanding members focused upon class relations did not save them from an analysis that, in Marx's judgement, was ‘vulgar', in that it focused upon the appearance of phenomena rather than their underlying causes. Political economy focused on relations of exchange, rather than on class relations among human beings. As he wrote famously in an oftquoted letter, for at least a generation before him bourgeois writers had recognised both class divisions in capitalism and that the basis of profit was exploitation; were these the central elements of his work, his contribution would have been trivial.

"The Geography of Hunger": from regional logic to universality

Abstract: The Geography of Hunger, now the target of reflective reading 50 years after it was first published, shows the author' elegant combination of argumentative skill and scientific confidence. Josue de Castro's provocative focus is both a new way of thinking and acting towards the food and nutritional situation in Brazil and a pioneering approach to the issue of collective hunger as a geographically universal phenomenon. Based on regional specificities, the book admits that partial contributions may help establish a characteristic map of the problem's universal nature, thus helping build a different image of Brazil and the world and opening up the possibility of constructing a universal plan to combat hunger and new perspectives for those seeking to correct regional differences and overcome underdevelopment. In this book, which is also a manifesto, Josue de Castro reinterprets the role of classical geography, taking into account one of the most important explanatory dimensions, i.e., political analysis, to unveil the significance and consequences of uneven spatial development. The concepts and proposals raised by The Geography of Hunger are alive and provide essential tools for critically rethinking Brazilian reality, particularly that of the Northeast. On its fiftieth anniversary, The Geography of Hunger is more current than ever because of stimulating and disturbing message.

Development Theory: A Guide to Some Unfashionable Perspectives

Abstract: There has been a marked tendency towards fragmented specialization in the field of development studies over the last two decades, as economists became increasingly interested in isolated details regarding development issues, losing sight of the relevance of these problems to the overall process of socio-economic development. Adopting a critical attitude towards such a trend, this book discusses a broad range of theories of economic development and underdevelopment, while emphasizing the usefulness of holistic approaches that view development as a historical process. Our journey starts with the relevant literature from Marx and Lenin, to neoclassical theories of international trade and the critique by the ECLA school under Raul Prebisch, and onward to the dependency theorists -- Gunder Frank, Amin and Wallerstein. This book deals in some detail with W.A. Lewis' dualism theory that focused on the internal relationship within the underdeveloped economy, the extensions of his model by Jorgenson, Fei and Ranis, and Harris and Todaro, and Nicholas Kaldor's seminal contributions to dualism. It also comprehensively covers the question of determination of the agricultural surplus in analysing the significance of the role of agriculture and agricultural surplus in the process of development. There is no one book that deals with the significant schools of thought within development economics. With its extraordinary wide scope, senior undergraduate and postgraduate students of economics, teachers and researchers will find this an invaluable and fascinating journey.

The Metamorphosis of the Marginal: The Debate Over the Informal Sector in Latin America

Abstract: The concept of informal sector is polymorphous. For some, it is a response to the bureaucratic entanglements that smother the productive forces capable of leading a country on to the road to competitive capitalism; for others, it is merely a set of activities that fall between the cracks of an incomplete and sluggish capitalism; a third interpetation of this phenomenon argues that it is a strategy on the part of capitalist enterprises to submerge or refunctionalize part of their production in order to minimize costs; finally, it has been altogether disassociated from underdevelopment and seen as part and parcel of the globalization of the world economy.In this paper, I show the intellectual journey that links the old theory of marginalization in Latin America to the views now in good currency. From a conception of the marginalized as a burden to be incorporated into societies as a condition for overcoming underdevelopment, we have evolved to one that sees these as bearers of a societal project that promis...

The flight of rent: the rise and fall of a national economy

Abstract: At the advent of independence, Algeria faced a crisis of underdevelopment. As a result, the new state structure took the lead, particularly under the Boumedienne regime, in creating economic development, funded by oil revenues and based on the concept of ‘industries industrialisantes’. This dependence on oil rent adversely affected social and political development, such that, in the wake of the crash in oil prices in 1986, Algeria's political consensus broke down as a small elite with a vested interest in the status quo found itself isolated from the mass of the population. The situation has been made immeasurably worse by Algeria's foreign debt which demand an ever greater proportion of oil rent, despite IMF‐inspired economic reform and debt rescheduling.

History and Underdevelopment in Morocco: The structural roots of conjuncture

Abstract: " History and Underdevelopment in Morocco is a wide-ranging interpretation of the history of Morocco. Drawing not only on the relevant literature of the Maghrib, but also on the more extensive literature on pre-capitalist formations' elsewhere, the author attempts to link the micro-history' of Morocco with the macro-history' of Europe and the Middle East. Covering the mediaeval period through to the present, and using a Marxist approach, he seeks to explain the roots of Moroccan underdevelopment in terms of Morocco's internal and external relations. It is a worthwhile contribution to understanding of Moroccan history and serious analysis of some crucial issues in the theory of historical change. Dr. B. A. Mojuetan is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria. "

Jobs, education and the underdevelopment trap

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to examine the complementarity between job opportunities and the level of worker education as a cause of the underdevelopment trap. I show that if firms or workers in the labour market have to spend money or time searching for a partner, then an underdevelopment trap may occur. This underdevelopment trap occurs due to thc complementarity between the firms' decision about their entry into the market and the workers' choice of the length of her education. This paper stresses the importance of a decrease in private costs of receiving higher education and recruiting new workers.

The new international division of sporting labor

Abstract: A new international division of sporting labor, or NISL, is upon us. The concept of NISL derives from revisions to 1960s dependencia theories of underdevelopment. As you will recall, those theories originated in Latin America and spread throughout the Second World and Third World…

Underdevelopment by Design: How Agricultural Development Programs Increase Poverty and Inequality in Poor Countries—The Case of Haiti

Abstract: The best thing one can say about many development projects is that they have had little impact on their participants; the worst is that they have added to the misery and inequalities of target populations. It is the contention of this article that many of these ill effects are the unintentional results of how development agencies implement projects. The study will examine some institutional and structural aspects of projects that undermine positive results in the “development process,” such as requirements for numeric measurement of progress and bias in development approach. A large agricultural development project in Haiti will be used as a case study to illustrate these points.