Is Development Always Possible?

Development work takes as given that its ultimate aims are achievable.

I was recently in London, and one of the joys of that city is the second floor of Foyles bookshop, dedicated to history, international relations, economics and development. Browsing through the books there, I came across an arresting title: The Myth of Development. Written by the Peruvian Oswaldo de Rivero, it poses a startling question: what if the whole concept of development is flawed? What if the countries we refer to as ‘developing’ are not developing and will never develop?

The first part of this question is nothing new: I myself prefer the term ‘less developed country’ (LDC) to ‘developing country’ because the latter implies a progress that may not always be evident. What de Rivero postulates is that this might not be a temporary state, but that these economies will never develop.

His basic argument is that development as we know it is not inevitable or simply a matter of policy. Rather, a number of economies in different stages encountered conditions that, coupled with the right policies and some natural endowment, experienced massive material expansions that provided the basis of their modern economies. These circumstances sometimes involved violence and coercion: the slave trade, colonialism and so on. The world economy has also developed as these economies have reached ‘developed’ status; it in turn has reached a sort of maturity in which the developed and less developed countries interact according to specific power relations and rules that derive from these.

In this reality, there are a number of less developed countries which de Rivero terms ‘Non-Viable Economies’. These economies, he argues, lack the natural endowments to take advantage of any advantageous historical moment. Equally dispiritingly, he argues that the current economic and political superstructure that governs the world economy means that such a historical moment is unlikely to ever again come about.

It’s worth considering his views. There’s no doubt that the development of the poorest countries in the world has been painfully slow. It also focuses our  minds very starkly on the two functions of aid: poverty alleviation in all its forms and economic development. If de Rivero is right, the goal of economic development should be abandoned outright, and as he says, these economies should focus only on the basics of human survival: food, shelter, security. Beyond this, though he doesn’t make the explicit link, it means the only viable policy for economic development is to open borders, and allow those born in non-viable economies to migrate to viable ones; to do anything else is condemn them to a life of penury.

The world of aid skepticism argues that economic development at the very least cannot really accelerated: thus, if the skeptics are correct, this is the only medium term policy for equalizing the opportunity to benefit from a world economy that power and might has shaped, at least until some other non-aid process pushes economic development forward. All of our development policies should be clear-sighted enough for us to make an argument as to what kind of approach they take and how.

Fortunately, I don’t really believe de Rivero’s arguments are useful too far beyond this thought experiment. While the pessimist that lives in most of us may be glad to hear someone articulate our worst fears, most indications are that he is wrong. Africa, home to most of the worst-off countries in the world is growing, and quite fast. The Commission for Africa stresses that optimism is the current consensus. In any case, economists have been very bad at guessing what will happen in the future, particularly when we are talking about a future that might be fifty or a hundred years down the line. Even historians are still vigorously debating why developed countries developed as and when they did – and after all some of them did so as recently as the last forty or fifty years.

One thing that is true from de Rivero’s analysis, though: the world economy is not structured in a way that helps the poorest. He takes this as a given, but it isn’t. We can change it. Trade rules, international extraction of resources and the power-based economy can all be challenged. We’re not doing nearly enough in this respect, and if economies are non-viable in the meantime, all of us in the west who benefit from these rules are partly to blame.

Photo Credit: markhillary