Conventional assumptions of development

1. It's assistance (designed to help 'underdeveloped' countries). Yes and no. It often benefits other groups, individuals and organizations. For instance, much of U.S. foreign assistance over the years has been provided to countries to fund development projects, which in many cases were required to buy American goods with the money--everything from vehicles down to paper clips. The largest percentage of foreign aid goes to Israel and Egypt, only one of which is a developing country. For instance, out of $12.186 billion appropriated for foreign aid in 1996, here are breakdowns by region:

source: US Information Agency (Here's a more recent map)

This suggests a couple of things: the assistance isn't always humanitarian, and it isn't spread evenly among poor countries. It often goes toward supporting countries with which the U.S. has strategic political interests. Here's a table that tries to rank the generosity of wealthy countries.

2. It's replicable-historically and geographically (industrialization, modernization)

   • There are two processes that it is assumed all developed countries have passed through:

     1. demographic transition--this is a process that happened to all industrialized countries, largely because of improvements in public health (better sanitation, mostly). It has 4 stages,
     • from high birth and death rates
     • to high birth rates and declining death rates,
     • to declining birth rates and low death rates,
     • to low birth and death rates.
       
       We assume every 'developing' society will go through this transition, and in fact most countries in the world are seeing declines in fertility rates. But most societies are still agrarian--that is, dependent on farming, usually using manual technologies, and are therefore dependent upon labor and large family size. In addition, most agrarian societies cannot depend on the state for any social safety nets, so large families help ensure some system of old-age security--there'll be children to take care of the elderly.
       
       
   2. Agrarian transformation--the economies of industrialized societies still have agricultural sectors. But the technologies they use to produce food--mechanization (tractors, combines, etc.), petrochemicals (fertilizers, fossil fuels), seed technologies (high yield varieties, more recently genetically modified seeds and plants)--are 'capital' as opposed to 'labor' intensive, and therefore require much less human power. In an agrarian society maybe 75% of the labor force is on farms, and they may be producing little in the way of surplus. Increased agricultural productivity means more food is produced by less people--The farm labor force in the U.S. around 1900 was about 50% of the active labor force. Now it's below 3%. So what happened to the laborers? Well, many left the farms, others may have stayed on as laborers on others' farms (ownership becomes consolidated, because of the increased investment necessary to take advantage of the farming technologies). The mechanization process itself creates industries--food processing, marketing, manufacturing and servicing farm machinery, etc. And this presumably drives economic growth, provides money to import oil (energy), build a transportation infrastructure to stimulate markets, provide more money through taxation for education, health care, etc. .
      
      
   • So, the theory has gone, if the industrialized countries did it, that is the pathway to development. Most policies have been designed to encourage both the demographic transition, and the transformation of the agricultural sector. We'll broach later the subject of whether this has been a successful strategy, but if you pay attention to the news or world events, you probably have an idea of what the answer to that will be. And if you read the page on the role of colonialism in development, you may begin to further question the logic--it could very well be that the countries that did industrialize and 'develop' did so at the expense of the others, who they used for cheap sources of labor, land and raw materials in many instances. That's what Keith Griffin suggests in his article. In other words, the assumption that development models can be replicated by other countries may not hold.
     
     
3. It's economic. Development is usually discussed in economic terms. Some of the basic measures that have been tried over the years to measure a country's 'progress' are of income and money:
   • GNP (gross national product) measures income generated by factors of production (land, labor and capital) owned by a nation's residents (Paul Johnson, 200). So for the U.S. WalMart's overseas investments would count here, as would Nike's, because the companies are American-based.

   • GDP (gross domestic product) measures income generated by factors of production located within a particular country's borders (Paul Johnson, 2000). It is a measure of goods and services produced by the nation's economy, and could include foreign investments (which would count as part of the GNP of their country of origin). Essentially, they are two ways to try to measure the size and growth of a country's economy. Some of the specific things that get measured include total wages and salaries, profits of incorporated and unincorporated businesses, rental incomes and interest incomes. However, these measures do not account for the distribution of growth--just the size of the pie, not how it's sliced. Is this important?

   • Per capita income explicitly controls for population. That is, take the GDP or GNP and divide it by the total population of the country. In other words, China has a very large GDP, because they have 1.3+ billion people. But their per capita GDP is much lower than the U.S. or Western European countries.

So here' are some questions for you:

• Do economic measures give an accurate picture of 'development'?
• Are people in a country doing better if the GDP or GNP or per capita measures are rising?
• What other kinds of things might it be important to measure to gauge whether a country is developing?
• What does development mean? Can we measure it without first defining it?
• You could probably answer any of those questions with 'that depends.' Welcome to the complex discourse of development.
  
  
4. It's structural--Development has implied a change in the structure of the economy and labor force. Some sectors decline in importance (e.g., farm labor), some sectors gain in importance (food processing, manufacture of machinery, petrochemicals, etc.). 
   
   
5. It's aggregate--Generally this has meant that development can be measured at the national level. So we talk about GNP or GDP. Think of a family. If you measure the well-being of a family by looking at household income, you make the assumption that everyone benefits equally from higher household income. This might hold for some families in some parts of the world, but it would be a serious mistake, for instance, to assume that increased household income in rural Africa benefited all women in the household. In some cases, cash crop campaigns have targeted men, who have converted village territory to permanent cultivation of cash crops (where women used to farm household grains and vegetables), enlisting the women in the household to perform much of the farm labor. But the checks for the crops at harvest time are likely to go to the man, and not likely to be evenly distributed. In many cultures men's disposable income is more likely spent on personal consumption, whereas women's is more likely spent on household needs--children's clothes or books or school fees, medicines, clothes, etc. Women may be worse off, have less autonomy to grow food for the household and its members, even though the total income of the household increases. If we measured learning in the classroom in aggregate numbers, it might not reflect variation from one student to the next. But, economists collect aggregate information about the economy, and these are things that can be compared from one country to the next, so there is some statistical convenience to these aggregate measures.

So, that covers some of the key assumptions of development. It's economic aid designed to help (we'll assume good intentions here, don't get too cynical yet!), it's supposed to transform the economy, we can measure it at the national level and know if it's occurring, and history suggests there are development pathways that any country can follow. But what forms does development take? Is it just transfer of cash? Who decides how the cash would or should be spent? 

Technology transfer: It sounds simple enough

Traditionally, we have practiced technology transfer. Developed countries believe in the pathways, see poor agrarian societies that seem barely able to produce their own food, and look for ways to transform a country's agricultural sector. Mechanization and petrochemicals have increased agricultural productivity in the industrialized world, so they can do the same in other parts of the world. 

So goes the assumption. We provide money to purchase technology, or merely transfer the technologies, and voila--they'll work the same way in the developing country as they worked for us. Right?? Tractors, for instance, and more generally, agricultural mechanization, should do to illustrate. Development scholars thought they could increase farm productivity, farmers could grow commercial crops, use less labor, sell the crop for cash, develop food processing and other industries, use cash to import the needs to drive development, while the 'extra' farm labor could leave the farms and work in factories, etc. What does one need to integrate the tractor in to a system of farming? Spare parts, service, fuel, infrastructure (need to get the crop to market), some idea of how to use the thing, bank financing (farmers would have to borrow), which would be easier if farmers had private rights to the land and could put it up as collateral to get loans, etc. Not to mention that petrochemicals--fertilizers and pesticides--are often required for an investment in mechanization to really pay off. And technology transfer is good for the industries that produce the technologies--it essentially opens up markets in other parts of the world for products and services.

So . . . that simple technology of a tractor carries a lot of cultural baggage with it. It isn't just a tractor, and the tractor can change the way people live and work, not always in predictable or welcome ways. The tractor technology hasn't worked in many parts of the world. In some cases it was too heavy and compacted the already nutrient-poor soils. In others there were terrain problems. The whole idea that it required an infrastructure was often not taken into account, and in some areas the countryside is strewn with rusted tractors and farm equipment, usually used by kids as a toy of some sort, and maybe there since the time the first tank of gasoline ran dry.

And we haven't even arrived at the gender dimension yet. Often times the technology transfer included assumptions about who was or should be doing the work. In many parts of Africa, as you'll find out, women are the primary agricultural workers. Yet cash crop campaigns often targeted men, changed the way land was used, and turned women into unpaid laborers working their husbands' fields. This is one example of how development can be gender-biased, actually harm women's well-being. 

None of this comes out of measures of development that focus on the size of a country's economy, or measures of national income. In other words, they might tell you whether an economy is growing, but they don't tell you how it's growing--how the benefits are being distributed. There are many ways a sociologist might consider looking at the distribution of benefits or income--by age, by race or ethnicity, by region of the country, by income level, by occupation, and by gender, among others. 

But what does it mean?

So we've discussed some of the key assumptions are that underlie development, and one approach to how to do it (technology transfer). But the assumptions, as I tried to show above, are often erroneous, and we still haven't really broached what development means. How do we define it? Improved standard of living? Growth in the economy? Lower unemployment? Higher quality of life? Access to consumer goods? Cable TV, two cars and a mortgage? A lifetime supply of Big Macs? Enough to eat? Mahatma Ghandi called development 'the realization of human potential.' The Brundtland Report stated that development entailed 'people meeting their present needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs' (often referred to as sustainable development). There is no 'right' definition of development. But it's important that you think for yourself about what development should mean. 

Dudley Seers questions the growth of national income as a measure of a country's development progress. He points out that certain types of economic growth may actually cause more problems than they solve (can you come up with an example?)

Problems with defining development

• National definitions don't always represent everyone (that come from the government)-Sometimes governments are the main obstacles to their countries' development. How could this be? For instance, a country whose government is rife with corruption, or controlled by one ethnic group that favors its own over other ethnic groups, or which shows favoritism by region or by political party, or that fails to recognize the important, often unpaid roles of women in household economies.

• Copying others' models of development--should the present state of one country be another's goal? For instance, what if every country in the world aspired to enjoy the standard of living of the 'average' American? The U.S., with under 5% of the world's population, consumes over 20% of the world's resources. Could everyone achieve that, assuming all countries wanted to? What does the Charleton article suggest?

• Who gets to decide? Even in a democracy, it's hard for people to come to agreement about what development should be. Dictatorships may actually make more progress toward a development goal, but that goal may be one that benefits only a minority ruling class in the country. 

Basic necessities

Seers asks, 

What are the absolute necessities to reach a universal aim--the realization of human personality? 

1. Food. Food is essentially the body's source of energy. It takes about 2500 calories a day minimum to maintain physical, mental development, the capacity to work, think, be productive, etc. For over 1 billion people in the world, this need is not met on a daily basis. It's pretty hard to image realizing one's potential as a human being without having the minimum amount of energy the body requires to function on a daily basis.
   

2. Livelihood. This refers to employment. Livelihood is, for most cultures, very important for indivdiuals' self-respect, independence, and motivation to achieve. In the industrialized world, economists often consider work as a 'disutility'--that is, something that we have to do to receive an income--and workers are trying to get more money for less work, and owners are trying to get more work for less pay (or replace workers altogether with machinery). In many cultures, work is an organic part of life, an important part of human fulfilment (see E.F. Schumacher's article 'Buddhist Economics' (1973) if you're interested in the concept). 
   

3. Equality. This should not be a by-product of Seers' first two necessities. Equality is important in its own right. In other words, a society in which no citizen goes to bed hungry, and where every citizen has fulfilling work to do, could still be characterized by high rates of inequality. Seers says it is not enough to fulfill the minimal requirements for everyone, yet concentrate all of the surplus wealth in the hands of a small percentage of the population. Another minimal requirement is that people have access to the social, political and cultural life of a society. Everyone should be able to vote, use public facilities, be protected from discrimination, pursue economic opportunities, etc.
   

Is Seers' perspective justifiable? Has he left anything out? We can probably all think of other goals that would contribute to the development of a society: formal education, participation in private and public life, citizenship, access to health care, etc. Seers is talking about the fundamental basic needs, not the ultimate goals of a development strategy. As seemingly simple as these three necessities are, there is not a country on earth that has been able to secure these for all of its citizens. 

• subsistence agriculture--in three years of living in rural Africa, I never once saw anyone from a Department of Agriculture come out to a village and try to estimate how much grain villagers had cultivated;

• domestic sector--as in the U.S. and elsewhere, work in the household is often unpaid and not reflected in the measures of a country's economy. In most parts of the third world, this work is overwhelmingly done by women. By not counting it, essentially undervaluing it, women's contributions to household economic production are grossly underestimated;

• informal sector--What is the informal sector? These are people who may work for cash, or even in-kind exchange, but it is largely unreported, and goes untaxed. Let's say you go to a weekly market in another village and sell some vegetables from a garden plot you cultivate. Or a man migrates from a rural area to the city in search of work, can't find a job, and ends up trying to sell trinkets and junk to people waiting in taxi or bus stations. Does the informal sector operate here in the U.S.? Can you think up examples?

• work, resources (wells, buildings, irrigation canals) in rural areas--This all represents economic activity, but is anyone counting it? 

  Who goes out and collects these data? What data would need to be collected? For a census? Taxes? Even the U.S. has a difficult time collecting good tax and census data, so imagine resource-strapped governments in countries with poor roads systems, little or no computerization of records, etc. The GNP or GDP are little more than wild guesses, based on a small formal sector economy, whose participants' incomes can actually be measured. The rest is guestimated. Much of the work in the informal, subsistence and domestic sectors is performed by women, especially in Africa. Thus development that tries to identify needs based on the 'visible' economy will underestimate women's contributions and be biased against women's needs, ignorant of their constraints to full participation in economy, politics, etc. Seers writes:

'published national income series for a large number of countries have very little relevance to economic reality .  .  .  decimal places are fantasy .  .  . '  keep that in mind next time you hear statistics about how well or poorly a country is doing. The measurements, especially if they're aggregate income measures, may have little relationship to most people's realities.

So, how do we measure some of these key concepts of development?

Poverty:

• nutrition
• income
• infant mortality
• but how can we measure these? Some are easier than others . . .

Unemployment:

Many developing countries lack the resources to collect employment data. In addition, many have large informal sectors, poor infrastructure, little computerization, etc. How to measure child labor practices?

Inequality:

• Seers calls for measures of change in poorest groups of the population (are they doing better or worse?). There are measures of inequality that compare income by quintiles. For instance, you can take the total income of a country and determine who gets what share of it. For the U.S. in 1999, the top 20% of income earners took home over 50% of the total income; the bottom 20% took home 4.2% (Soss, 2002).

• measure access to resources, services -- for instance, how to measure if men and women have equal access to health care (e.g., doctors / 10,000 population), government services (who has the right to vote? Who exercises it?)

• Equality in what ways? In terms of income? Rights? Opportunity?

Interdependence of poverty, unemployment, inequality

Seers says that these three variables: poverty, unemployment and inequality, are interrelated. Poor people, especially underfed and malnourished people, are less likely to find gainful work, or have formal education and marketable job skills. On the other hand, in many third world countries there are legions of young, well-educated urbanites (mostly men, but some women) who can't find meaningful work. Those discriminated against are most likely to encounter difficulties in the job market or in providing for families and dependents.

Ironies of development

• Is there a need for some inequality in society? If everyone made the same amount of money, why would people bother investing in human capital, in job skills, becoming doctors, professionals, etc.? Who would risk opening a business if profit-making were severely restricted? Wouldn't it be easier just to work for someone else?

• Can rising output and greater equality occur simultaneously? Can an economy grow without becoming more unequal?

• Will greater equality (e.g., greater tax burden on the wealthy) encourage a 'brain drain?' In many third world countries, the most educated are looking for opportunities to leave their countries and seek better paying and more fulfilling jobs in the industrialized nations. And who can blame them? From the government's point of view, though, why invest in higher education if people are going to take it and leave? 

Needs (for development to occur)

• Better information to assess change-are things getting better or worse? Statistics are critical . . . but which to collect, and how?

• A mechanism to collect household-level information

• Better understanding of forces driving inequality at international level, and their effects on countries' development efforts. In other words, is it possible that forces at the global level can make it difficult for countries to pursue their development policies? If a country designates a free trade zone to encourage multinational companies to come and invest (but to do so it agrees not to tax them), the company will provide jobs for citizens. But if the wages of those jobs become too good--that is, as development and improved living standards begin to show--the company may decide to leave for a country with a cheaper labor supply. This is currently happening in Mexico. Multinational firms are leaving for China, where labor costs .25 / hr, versus $1.00 - $1.50 / hr in many places in Mexico.
• Greater participation on the part of the 'beneficiaries' of development? Who is development intended to help? Does anyone know what the 'beneficiaries' want? Why is the word 'beneficiaries' always in quotes? Beneficiary implies a passive arrangement--recipients of development. Maybe a more active relationship is called for, where people actually participate in development, make decisions, take some ownership over the development process? 

For a broader discussion of US and Industrialized nation development aide, see the global issues website.