Devil Take the Hindmost?: The Least Developed in a New International Economic Order

There have been two major new thrusts in the development literature and experience of the last few years. The first has been the greatly increased emphasis upon employment and, more broadly, the distributional effects of different development strategies and projects. Growth, as conventionally defined, is no longer considered an adequate proximate target if poverty alleviation is the ultimate objective, since there can be no assurance that its gains will trickle down to those at the lower end of the distribution spectrum. Some have set about trying to construct new measures of aggregative national development performance which better reflect these new perceptions—either by developing ‘social indicators’ or by revising the weighting system employed in more conventional growth accounting; others have tried to incorporate them into the methodology of benefit/cost analysis for use in assessing micro-level projects. At the international level, there has been a corresponding increase in the concern, at least as officially expressed, as to the effects of total trade, aid and other resources flows upon the least developed countries. ‘Trickle down’ from world growth is no more assured, and probably less so, than that from growth within nations.