The Struggle for Development

Abstract

The history of development economics as a scholarly discipline has followed two trajectories in the social sciences: in the first instance, an authoritative wave of studies led by Gerschenkron and Rostow has argued that any country follows a linear path from backwardness to growth and development through successive steps. This trajectory is supposed to gain traction in former developing countries when these economies catch up with industrial nations through the acquisition of new technologies, the creation of new economic institutions and a vast mobilisation of bank credit: this tangle of multiple factors prompts the least developed countries (LDCs) to experience a fast-growing economic modernisation. The second theory worth mentioning in order to review a text on contemporary development policies such as The Struggle for Development by Benjamin Selwyn, is the marxist theory of underdevelopment. Post-WWII marxist theories of modernisation (Baran 1957) have brought into question a classical idea of ‘modernisation’ as the evolution of ‘tradition’; according to marxist economic sociology the process of modernisation stems from a set of multiple exploitative relations between a few core capitalist countries and the underdeveloped periphery (Wallerstein 1983): such unequal balance of power relations let the advanced industrial economies acquire at low-price the LDCs’ strategic and natural resources, as well as their manpower. Accordingly, the industrialised economies gain the lion’s share of global manufacturing and trading. The Struggle for Development falls in this category of marxist interpretation of development as both a theoretical concept and as a policy specific to contemporary global economic governance