Development, underdevelopment and global inequality

• Economic definitions measure development by GDP or GNI per capita — output per head. Simple and comparable, but they ignore distribution (an oil state can be rich and desperately unequal), ignore unpaid and subsistence work, and say nothing about whether people's lives are actually going well.
• Social definitions use indicators of well-being: literacy, schooling, life expectancy, infant mortality. The Human Development Index combines income with health and education for exactly this reason.
• Sen (Development as Freedom) makes the decisive argument: development should be understood as the expansion of people's real capabilities — their substantive freedom to be and to do what they have reason to value. Income is only a means; the end is freedom. Poverty, on this view, is capability deprivation, and famine is caused not by a shortage of food but by a failure of entitlement — people's inability to command food, which is why famines have historically not occurred in functioning democracies with a free press.
• Terminology matters. 'Third World', 'developing', 'the Global South', 'Majority World' — each carries assumptions. 'Underdevelopment' in dependency theory is not a stage on the way to development but an active process done to a country.

Exam craft: begin any 20-mark answer here by problematising the word 'development' itself. Whoever gets to define development gets to prescribe the policy.

Sen on development

The West as the model

• Modernisation theory emerged in the Cold War West. Its diagnosis: poor countries are poor because their internal culture and institutions are traditional — fatalistic, ascriptive, particularistic, collectivist. The remedy is to become more like the West.
• Parsons supplies the cultural argument through his pattern variables: traditional societies are governed by ascription, particularism, affectivity and collective orientation; modern ones by achievement, universalism, affective neutrality and individualism. Development means a cultural shift from the first set to the second.
• Rostow supplies the economic model — five stages of economic growth:
  1. Traditional society — subsistence agriculture, limited technology.
  2. Preconditions for take-off — Western values, capital and expertise arrive; infrastructure is built.
  3. Take-off — investment rises, manufacturing grows, a new entrepreneurial class emerges.
  4. Drive to maturity — growth spreads across the economy; investment in education and technology.
  5. The age of high mass consumption — the Western consumer society.
• Hoselitz stressed the role of Western-style education and of urbanisation in spreading modern values.
• Policy implications: aid, investment, Western expertise, education and free markets. This is the theory behind much Western aid policy.

Criticisms: it is ethnocentric — it assumes the Western path is the only path; it blames the poor country's own culture; it ignores colonialism entirely, as though poor countries had simply been left behind rather than plundered; and empirically, decades of aid and 'modernisation' have not produced take-off in many countries.

Rostow's take-off

Underdevelopment as something done to you

• Frank's dependency theory turns modernisation theory inside out. Poor countries are not 'undeveloped' (a starting point) but underdeveloped — actively made poor. He describes a chain of metropolis–satellite relations: the satellite's surplus is extracted and channelled upward to the metropolis, at every level from the village to the world system. His famous formulation is 'the development of underdevelopment': the wealth of the core and the poverty of the periphery are two products of the same process.
• The mechanism is historical. Slavery and the plantation economy; colonial extraction of raw materials; the forced destruction of local industry; and, after formal independence, neo-colonialism — control exercised through trade terms, debt, aid conditions and TNCs rather than through direct rule.
• Frank's policy conclusion is that isolation or socialist revolution is the only escape, since participation in the world market is precisely what impoverishes.
• Wallerstein's world-systems theory refines this. There is a single capitalist world economy, not a set of national economies, divided into core, semi-periphery and periphery. The semi-periphery is the crucial addition: it is exploited by the core but exploits the periphery, which stabilises the whole system by preventing a simple two-way polarisation. Crucially, countries can move between zones — which answers the objection that dependency theory cannot explain the rise of the East Asian economies.

Criticisms of dependency theory: it is too pessimistic and cannot easily explain the rapid growth of South Korea, Taiwan or Singapore, all of which developed through integration into world trade, not by withdrawing from it; it downplays internal factors such as corruption and conflict; and its prescription of isolation has not worked where tried.

Modernisation or dependency?

Tap a claim, then tap the theory it belongs to.

Markets, adjustment and the alternatives

• Neoliberalism holds that development is blocked by too much state: corruption, protectionism, bloated public sectors and subsidies distort markets. Its prescription — the 'Washington consensus' — is deregulation, privatisation, cuts to public spending, opening to foreign investment and free trade.
• The instrument was the structural adjustment programme (SAP): the IMF and World Bank lent to indebted countries on condition that they cut spending, privatise and liberalise. Critics argue SAPs forced cuts to exactly the health and education budgets development needs, exposed fragile economies to competition they could not survive, and served the interests of Western creditors. Their defenders reply that they imposed necessary discipline. Either way, SAPs are the clearest possible illustration of neo-colonial power exercised through debt.
• People-centred development is the reply from below. It insists development must be bottom-up, participatory, environmentally sustainable and grounded in what local people actually want. Sen's capability approach is its theoretical foundation; NGOs, micro-finance and grassroots projects are its practice. Critics note NGOs are unaccountable, dependent on donors, and can substitute for — rather than build — public services.
• Gender and development. Boserup showed that development projects which assumed men were the farmers systematically bypassed women, who in many regions do most of the agricultural work — so 'development' actively worsened women's position. Feminists argue investment in women's education and control of income is among the most effective development interventions there is.

Structural adjustment

Who really runs the global economy?

• Globalisation. Held et al distinguish hyperglobalists (the nation state is finished; a single global economy now rules), sceptics (globalisation is exaggerated; states and regional blocs still dominate) and transformationalists (globalisation is real but uneven, and reshapes rather than abolishes the state). Give the three positions and you have an instant evaluation paragraph.
• TNCs. Optimists (modernisation) argue transnational corporations bring capital, technology, jobs, skills and export markets. Pessimists (dependency) argue they extract profits, pay minimal tax, drive down wages and conditions, play states against one another to secure concessions, and are accountable to shareholders rather than to the populations they affect. Sklair argues a transnational capitalist class now exists whose interests are global rather than national — and Klein (No Logo) documents the outsourcing of production to export processing zones where labour rights are weakest.
• Aid. Distinguish bilateral (state to state, and frequently tied to the purchase of the donor's own goods and services) from multilateral (channelled through the World Bank, IMF or UN). Distinguish emergency relief from long-term development aid.
  • The case for aid (Sachs, and modernisation theory): it breaks the poverty trap by supplying the capital and infrastructure that poor countries cannot generate themselves.
  • The case against: Moyo (Dead Aid) argues aid to Africa has fostered dependency, propped up corrupt governments and crowded out enterprise; Hayter, from the left, argues aid is a tool of imperialism, buying political compliance and opening markets. Riddell gives the balanced verdict — aid can work, but its effectiveness depends entirely on how it is given and to whom.
• Trade and debt. The terms of trade have historically favoured manufactured goods over primary commodities; agricultural subsidies in rich countries undercut producers in poor ones; and debt servicing can exceed spending on health and education combined. This is the structural argument, and it is stronger than any argument about aid volumes.

Moyo on aid

Theorist to concept

Match each theorist to their key idea.

Education, health, population, gender, conflict and the environment

• Education. Modernisation theory sees Western-style schooling as the carrier of modern values. Critics (Freire) argue imported curricula devalue local knowledge and produce a 'brain drain' of the educated to the West. Female education, however, is consistently among the most powerful levers of development.
• Health. Improvements in sanitation, nutrition, vaccination and maternal care have transformed life expectancy. But dependency theorists point to the brain drain of trained doctors and nurses to rich countries, and to pharmaceutical patenting that prices medicines out of reach.
• Population. The demographic transition model describes the move from high birth and death rates, through a phase of falling deaths but still-high births (rapid growth), to low rates of both. The neo-Malthusian fear is that population outruns resources; the sociological reply is that fertility falls reliably when child mortality falls and when women gain education and control over reproduction — so development is the best contraceptive.
• Urbanisation. Rapid migration to cities has outpaced the growth of employment and housing, producing vast informal settlements. Modernisation reads this as a stage; dependency reads it as the consequence of an agricultural sector wrecked by cash-cropping for export.
• War and conflict destroy infrastructure, displace populations and consume public spending — and are often rooted in colonial borders and in competition for resources. Development and security are not separable.
• The environment. Beck's global risk society: environmental harms cross borders and are manufactured by industrial society itself. The core dilemma is one of justice: the countries that contributed least to the problem face its worst effects, while being told to forgo the industrialisation that created the wealth of those telling them. Sustainable development — meeting present needs without compromising future generations — is the attempted answer, but critics call it a slogan that conceals the conflict between growth and ecology.

Population and development

Judging the theories

• Modernisation theory is the theory of the powerful: ethnocentric, silent on colonialism, and empirically embarrassed by the fact that many countries have followed its prescriptions for decades without take-off. Yet it is right that internal factors — governance, corruption, conflict, institutions — do matter, and dependency theory's tendency to treat poor countries as having no agency at all is a real weakness.
• Dependency theory supplies what modernisation theory lacks: history. But it struggles with the East Asian economies, which grew spectacularly through world trade, and its prescription of isolation has not been vindicated.
• World-systems theory is the more supple successor, because the semi-periphery and the possibility of movement between zones let it account for both persistence and mobility.
• Neoliberalism has been the dominant policy framework, and structural adjustment its instrument. Its record is contested, but its critics can point to cuts in health and education, and to the plain fact that its prescriptions were imposed on the weak by the strong.
• Sen and people-centred development reframe the question altogether: not 'how do we make them like us?' but 'what freedoms do people actually have reason to value?' That is the move that most impresses examiners — and it is also the one most likely to be true.

Exam craft: the best answers do not simply pick a theory. They show that each theory answers a different question — modernisation asks what is missing inside the country, dependency asks what was taken out of it, and Sen asks what development is for.

Evaluating dependency theory

The big ideas to know

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