A survey of development theories

After World War II a number of developing countries attained independence from their former colonial rulers. One of the common claims made by leaders of independence movements was that colonialism had been responsible for perpetuating low living standards in the colonies. Thus economic development after independence became an objective of policy not only because of the humanitarian desire to raise living standards but also because political promises had been made, and failure to make progress toward development would, it was feared, be interpreted as a failure of the independence movement. Developing countries in Latin America and elsewhere that had not been, or recently been, colonies took up the analogous belief that economic domination by the industrial countries had thwarted their development, and they, too, joined the quest for rapid growth.

At that early period, theorizing about development, and about policies to attain development, accepted the assumption that the policies of the industrial countries were to blame for the poverty of the developing countries. Memories of the Great Depression, when developing countries’ terms of trade had deteriorated markedly, producing sharp reductions in per capita incomes, haunted many policymakers. Finally, even in the developed countries, the Keynesian legacy attached great importance to investment.

In this milieu, it was thought that a “shortage of capital” was the cause of underdevelopment. It followed that policy should aim at an accelerated rate of investment. Since most countries with low per capita incomes were also heavily agricultural (and imported most of the manufactured goods consumed domestically), it was thought that accelerated investment in industrialization and the development of manufacturing industries to supplant imports through “import substitution” was the path to development. Moreover, there was a fundamental distrust of markets, and a major role was therefore assigned to government in allocating investments. Distrust of markets extended especially to the international economy.

Experience with development changed perceptions of the process and of the policies affecting it in important ways. Nonetheless, there are significant elements of truth in some of the earlier ideas, and it is important to understand the thinking underlying them.

Development economics may be contrasted with another branch of study, called growth economics, which is concerned with the study of the long-run, or steady-state, equilibrium growth paths of the economically developed countries, which have long overcome the problem of initiating development.

Growth theory assumes the existence of a fully developed modern capitalist economy with a sufficient supply of entrepreneurs responding to a well-articulated system of economic incentives to drive the growth mechanism. Typically, it concentrates on macroeconomic relations, particularly the ratio of savings to total output and the aggregate capital–output ratio (that is, the number of units of additional capital required to produce an additional unit of output). Mathematically, this can be expressed (the Harrod–Domar growth equation) as follows: the growth in total output (g) will be equal to the savings ratio (s) divided by the capital–output ratio (k); i.e., g = s k. Thus, suppose that 12 percent of total output is saved annually and that three units of capital are required to produce an additional unit of output: then the rate of growth in output is 12 3% = 4% per annum. This result is obtained from the basic assumption that whatever is saved will be automatically invested and converted into an increase in output on the basis of a given capital–output ratio. Since a given proportion of this increase in output will be saved and invested on the same basis, a continuous process of growth is maintained.

Growth theory, particularly the Harrod–Domar growth equation, has been frequently applied or misapplied to the economic planning of a developing country. The planner starts from a desired target rate of growth of perhaps 4 percent. Assuming a fixed overall capital–output ratio of, say, 3, it is then asserted that the developing country will be able to achieve this target rate of growth if it can increase its savings to 3 × 4 percent="12" percent of its total output. The weakness of this type of exercise arises from the assumption of a fixed overall capital–output ratio, which assumes away all the vital problems affecting the developing country’s capacity to absorb capital and invest its saving in a productive manner. These problems include the central problem of the efficient allocation of available savings among alternative investment opportunities and the associated organizational and institutional problems of encouraging the growth of a sufficient supply of entrepreneurs; the provision of appropriate economic incentives through a market system that correctly reflects the relative scarcities of products and factors of production; and the building up of an organizational framework that can effectively implement investment decisions in both the private and the public sectors. Such problems, which generally affect the developing country’s absorptive capacity for capital and a number of other inputs, constitute the core of development economics. Development economics is needed precisely because the assumptions of growth economics, based as they are on the existence of a fully developed and well-functioning modern capitalist economy, do not apply.

The developing and underdeveloped countries are a very mixed collection of countries. They differ widely in area, population density, and natural resources. They are also at different stages in the development of market and financial institutions and of an effective administrative framework. These differences are sufficient to warn against wide-sweeping generalizations about the causes of underdevelopment and all-embracing theoretical models of economic development. But when development economics first came into prominence in the 1950s, there were powerful intellectual and political forces propelling the subject toward such general theoretical models of development and underdevelopment. First, many writers who popularized the subject were frankly motivated by a desire to persuade the developed countries to give more economic aid to the underdeveloped countries, on grounds ranging from humanitarian considerations to considerations of cold-war strategy. Second, there was the reaction of the newly independent underdeveloped countries against their past “colonial economic pattern,” which they identified with free trade and primary production for the export market. These countries were eager to accept general theories of economic development that provided a rationalization for their deep-seated desire for rapid industrialization. Third, there was a parallel reaction, at the academic level, against older economic theory, with its emphasis on the efficient allocation of scarce resources and a striving after new and “dynamic” approaches to economic development.

All of these forces combined to produce a crop of theoretical approaches that soon developed into a fairly fixed orthodoxy with its characteristic emphasis on “crash” programs of investment in both material and human capital, on domestic industrialization, and on government economic planning as the standard ingredients of development policy. These new theories have continued to have a considerable influence on the conventional wisdom in development economics, although in retrospect most of them have turned out to be partial theories. A broad survey of these theories, under three main heads, is given below. It is particularly relevant to the debate over whether the underdeveloped countries should seek economic development through domestic industrialization or through international trade. The limitations of these new theories—and how they led to a gradual revival of a more pragmatic approach todevelopment problems, which falls back increasingly on the older economic theory of efficient allocation of resources—are subsequently traced.