Colin Leys The Rise and Fall of Development Theory 1996 James Currey Ltd oXFORD
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Dependency theory inverted many of the assumptions of modernization theory. It saw metropolitan policy as maleficient, no benefient; inflows od foreign inverstment were seen as giving rise to much greater interest and profit outflows; 'modernizing elites' were really compradores, or lumpen- bourgeoisies, serving their own and foreign interests, not those of the people; world trade perpetuated structures of underdevelopment, rather than acting as a solvent for them. Capitalist develp,met offered nothing to the periphery; the solution lay in reducing lnks to the metropoles and bringing about 'autocentric' national economic growth.
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It is becoming clear that 'underdevelopment' and 'dependency theory is no longer serviceable and must now be transcended. The evidence for this is (i) r
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USt generally holds or implies that the condition of people in under-developed countries is the result of exploitation, and this certainly appeals to 'common sense' as one contemplates generally the record of colonialism, in , say, Peru ir the Cingo,
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For instance, when an MNC moves ots television-manufacturing operation from the USA or Taiwan it does so precisely to reduce the overall level of real wages it pays and so increase absolute surplus value. The Taiwanese workers are evidently more exploited that the US workers whom they replace, using identical equipment. They are also likely to have higher real incomes than Taiwanese workers in plants with much lower organic composition of capital and who as a result produce less per hour of labour.
Which of these two groups of workers is considered more exploited depends both on relative wages and relative productivity,
Diana Hunt Economic Theories of Development barnes & Noble Books 1989 Maryland
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Dos Santos argues that Dependence is not a purely external phenomenon. It can be manifest in its various forms only because of the collaboration of domestic dominant classes with the metropolitan bourgeoisie. hence, analysis of a national situation of dependence requires the analysis also of its own specific domestic characteristics and movemeny.
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Dos Santos, three aspects of dependence combine to constrain economic development in the periphery.
1. Since industrial development in the periphery is dependent on exports to earn the foreign currency for purchase of essential inputs, the first consequence of contemporary dependence is the need to preserve the traditional export sector. This 'limits economically the development of the internal market by the conservation of backward relations of production and signifies, politically, the maintenance of power by taridtional dcadent oligarchies. In countries where the export sector is controlled by foreign capital it also signifis substantial profit repatriation and enhanced political dependence.
2.Not only is industrial development strongly conditioned by the balance of payments, but the latter has an inherent tendency towards deficit due to the relations of dependence themselves. Thus trade relations take place in a highly monopolised international market, which tends to lower the price of raw materials and to raise the prices of industrial products. Moreover, modern technology also tebnds toward replacement of natural raw materials with synthetics, thus reducing denabd at the centre for the periphery exports. In addition, foreign capital retains control over the most dynamic sectors in the periphery and repatriates high profits. 'Foreign-financing'- and financial dependence- thus become necessary both to cover the existing balance of payments deficit and to provide the foreign exchange for further development.
3. Meanwbhile, industrial development is also strongly conditioned by the technological monoply exercised by imperialist centres- by the cost of technnology and by tendency to obtain it in the form of invstment by foreign firms. Use of this technology in the labour abundant economies of the periphery results in the super-exploitation of low-wage labour, in limited labour absorbtion, continuing mass deprivation and restricted debelopment in the domestic market.
Dos Santos suggests it is, that eachs tage of dependence is reinforced by a neccesary coincidence between dominant and foreign interests, then it follows that the only way to break out of dependence is radically to change the internal structure that reinforces it and to establish popular revolutionary government which open the wasy to socialism.
217 critisims.
Argued that it is imposiible to draw a hard and fast line between economies that are dependent and those that are not. Rather, international dependence affects all economies to varying degrees.
Seers identifies three key resources which are needed by all national economies, and ingrowing amounts in those which output and/or average living standards are expanding. These are oil, cereals, and technology. No country, Seers argues, is capable of truly aitonomous economic development in that it can supply all its own needs for all three of these resources. Rather, countries can be ranked from least dependent to fully dependent according to whethner they are net importers of one, two or all three of these items. The tests of the significance of this categorisation would come, says Seers, in periods of economic crisis, specifically in periods of disruption to international trade, when the more dependent economies (according to this definition) would suffer the most.
Seers critique thus ends positively, which an attempt to give greater operational precision to the dependence concept by focusing on degress of dependence rather than on a clear-cut dichotomy between economic independence and dependence.
(Not true because japan.)
Magnus Blomstrom & Bjorn Hettne Development Theory in Trasition
43ECLA sttempted to show that underdevelopment is not the same as undevelopment.
