The Development Dilemma

Abstract

In the years after 1945, developing market economies made respectable economic progress; hardly any of them entered the category of the industrialised market economies, however. And in the 1980s many of them, especially those in Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and the Middle East became burdened with negative growth of per capita income; in some cases, decades of development efforts were wiped out. No development theory had predicted this result; conjectured causes of this phenomenon, as well as the solutions proposed, have been of an ad hoc nature. But unless a theoretical understanding of the nature of the malady is achieved, we will not know whether the solutions proposed by the World Bank and others will not in fact make the situation worse, especially as most of the solutions proposed address the problem of repaying the debts rather than how to continue on the road to development.