Investment, Debt and Growth: a Diversity of Experience

The starting-point is the fact (if we can trust at least the broad message of the macroeconomic statistics) that during the 1970s the developing countries as a group even if we exclude major oil exporters — maintained their rates of economic growth in fece of the slow-down of growth in the industrial countries of the North, the rise in energy prices, balance of payments problems, upheavals in commodity prices, the accumulating debt, inflation.… Summary figures are shown in Table 7.1, and the outcome is not quite in accord with those ‘centre-periphery’ or ‘dependency’ explanations of North-South relationships which allot the role of ‘motor of growth’ in the world economy to the industrialised regions. Was the transmission chain from North to South weakened? Does this short period of history indicate a greater capacity of the South for self-reliance, or for resistance to external misfortunes, than would have been expected a decade or two ago? And if, as many ‘growth pessimists’ hold, the North passed in the 1970s a turning-point in the historical series of Kondratief cycles what conclusions can be drawn for the prospects for economic progress in the South?