Domestic Policies in Developing Countries and their Effects on Employment, Income Inequality and Poverty

The world of the 1990s is very different from the world of the 1950s when issues of employment, income inequality and poverty in developing countries first attracted the attention of policy makers. The world at mid-century was not closely integrated. Western Europe was still recovering from the effects of the Second World War and many of the wartime controls were still in place. The socialist bloc had entered a period of consolidation and was largely isolated from the capitalist economies. Latin America, having suffered the economic consequences of the deep depression of the 1930s and the disruption of international commerce during the 1940s, had turned inward and adopted an import substituting strategy of industrialization. Asia was in the early stages of decolonization and the construction of national economies in newly independent countries. Africa still had a decade to wait before the European empires that dominated the continent collapsed and at last allowed Africans to regain some control over their destiny. Japan, like Western Europe, was slowly recovering from the Second World War and its period of explosive growth and massive penetration of world markets was still over the horizon just out of sight. The United States, by far the strongest economy, was the champion of free trade and the free movement of capital.