Traditional Development Policy

The objective of development economics is to explore the reasons for persistent underdevelopment and poverty, and to frame policies that can be employed by Third-World governments and international organizations to resolve these problems. Typically the role of development policy is viewed as removing those obstinate economic, political, and social barriers to transformational change in the developed world (World Bank 1993: 116). In this chapter the nature and scope of development policies are reviewed, and their theoretical and empirical foundations are discussed. It is argued that the extensive disagreement between experts on most policy issues, together with its fragmented nature, has risen because of the failure to construct a satisfactory general economic and political theory of the global development process. Policies are based on severely constrained partial theories, a good deal of casual empiricism, and unrestrained economic ideology. And much of the resulting policy lacks integration into a consistent whole. In order to resolve these problems it is essential to construct a general theory of economic development.