A survey of development theories

First, there are the theories that regard the shortage of some strategic input (such as the supply of savings, foreign exchange, or technical skills) as the main cause of underdevelopment. Once this missing component was supplied—say, by external economic aid—it was believed that economic development would follow in a predictable manner based on fixed quantitative relationships between input and output. The overall capital–output ratio, mentioned above, is the most well-known of these fixed technical coefficients. But similar fixed coefficients have been assumed between the foreign-exchange requirements and total output and between the input of skilled manpower and output.

Given the broad relationship between capital accumulation and economic growth established in growth theory, it was plausible for growth theorists and development economists to argue that the developing countries were held back mainly by a shortage in the supply of capital. These countries were then saving only 5–7 percent of their total product, and it was manifest (and it remains true) that satisfactory growth cannot be supported by so low a level of investment. It was therefore thought that raising the savings ratio to 10–12 percent was the central problem for developing countries. Early development policy therefore focused on raising resources for investment. Steps toward this end were highly successful in most developing countries, and savings ratios rose to the 15–25 percent range. However, growth rates failed even to approximate the savings rates, and theorists were forced to search for other explanations of differences in growth rates.

It has become increasingly clear that there can be much wastage of capital resources in the developing countries for various reasons, such as wrong choice of investment projects, inefficient implementation and management of these projects, and inappropriate pricing and costing of output. These faults are particularly noticeable in public-sector investment projects and are one of the reasons why the Pearson Commission Report of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (1969) found that “the correlation between the amounts of aid received in the past decades and the growth performance is very weak.” But even in the private sector there may be a considerable distortion in the direction of investment induced by policies designed to encourage development. Thus, in most underdeveloped countries, a considerable part of private expansion investment, both foreign and domestic, has been diverted into the expansion of the manufacturing sector, catering to the domestic market through various inducements, including tariff protection, tax holidays, cheap loans, and generous foreign-exchange allocations granting the opportunity to import capital goods cheaply at overvalued exchange rates. As a consequence, there developed a very considerable amount of excess capacity in the manufacturing sector of the underdeveloped countries pursuing such policies.

In the 1950s most developing countries were primary commodity exporters, relying on crops and minerals for the bulk of their foreign-exchange earnings through exports, and importing a large number of manufactured goods. The experience of colonialism, and the distrust of the international economy that it engendered, led policymakers in most developing countries to adopt a policy of import substitution. This policy was intended to promote industrialization by protecting domestic producers from the competition of imports. Protection, in the form of high tariffs or the restriction of imports through quotas, was applied indiscriminately, often to inherently high-cost industries that had no hope of ever becoming internationally competitive. Also, after the early stages of import substitution, protected new industries tended to be very intensive in the use of capital and especially of imported capital goods.

The import-substitution approach defined “industrialization” rather narrowly as the expansion of the modern manufacturing sector based on capital-intensive technology. Capital was therefore identified with durable capital equipment in the form of complex machinery and other inputs that the underdeveloped countries were not able to produce domestically. Thus, foreign-exchange requirements were calculated on the basis of the fixed technical input-output coefficients of the manufacturing sector.

With high levels of protection for domestic industry, and with exchange rates that were often maintained at unrealistic levels (usually in an effort to make imported capital goods “cheap”), the experience of most developing countries was that export earnings grew relatively slowly. The simultaneously sharp increase in demand for imported capital goods (and for raw materials and replacement parts as well) resulted in unexpectedly large increases in imports. Most developing countries found themselves with critical foreign-exchange shortages and were forced to reduce imports in order to cut their current-account deficits to manageable proportions.

The cutbacks in imports usually resulted in reduced growth rates, if not recessions. This result led to the view that economic stagnation was caused primarily by a shortage of foreign exchange with which to buy essential industrial inputs. But over the longer term the growth rates of countries that continued to protect their domestic industries heavily not only stagnated but declined sharply. Contrasting the experience of countries that persisted in policies of import substitution with those that followed alternative policies (see below) subsequently demonstrated that foreign-exchange shortage was a barrier to growth only within the context of the protectionist policies adopted and was not inherently a barrier to the development process itself.

As it became apparent that the physical accumulation of capital was not by itself the key to development, many analysts turned to a lack of education and skills among the population as being a crucial factor in underdevelopment. If education and skill are defined as everything that is required to raise the productivity of the people in the developing countries by improving their skills, enterprise, initiative, adaptability, and attitudes, this proposition is true but is an empty tautology. However, the need for skills and training was first formulated in terms of specific skills and educational qualifications that could be supplied by crash programs in formal education. The usual method of manpower planning thus started from a target rate of expansion in output and tried to estimate the numbers of various types of skilled personnel that would be required to sustain this target rate of economic growth on the basis of an assumed fixed relationship between inputs of skill and national output.

This approach was plausible enough in many developing countries immediately after their political independence, when there were obvious gaps in various branches of the administrative and technical services. But most countries passed through this phase rather quickly. In the meantime, as the result of programs in education expansion, their schools and colleges began producing large numbers of fresh graduates at much faster rates than their general rate of economic growth could supply suitable new jobs for. This created a growing problem of educated unemployment. An important factor behind the rapid educational expansion was the expectation that after graduation students would be able to obtain well-paying white-collar jobs at salary levels many times the prevailing per capita income of their countries. Thus, the underdeveloped countries’ inability to create jobs to absorb their growing armies of graduates created an explosive element in what came to be called the revolution of expectations.

It is possible to see a close parallelism between the narrow concept of industrialization as the expansion of the manufacturing sector and the narrow concept of education as the academic and technical qualifications that can be supplied by the expansion of the formal educational system. If a broader concept of education, relevant for economic development, is needed, it is necessary to seek it in the pervasive educational influence of the economic environment as a whole on the learning process of the people of the underdeveloped countries. This is a complex process that depends on, among other less easily analyzable things, the system of economic incentives and signals that can mold the economic behaviour of the people of the underdeveloped countries and affect their ability to make rational economic decisions and their willingness to introduce or adapt to economic changes. Unfortunately, the economic environment in many underdeveloped countries is dominated by a network of government controls that tend not to be conducive to such ends.