1981: Volume 12
Volume 12 Number 2 May 1981
Edited by: Richard Jolly and Susan Joekes
The Brandt Report North-South: A programme for survival was published in Britain just over a year ago. Within two weeks of publication the Report had sold out and was being reprinted. (World-wide sales have now exceeded 120,000 an exceptionally high figure.) Editorials, articles and reviews appeared in all the major newspapers.
Non-governmental organisations and development groups reported unprecedented interest in the Report and numerous public meetings have been held in all parts of the country. Some 30,000 copies of a summary sheet on the Report have been distributed by the Centre of World Development Education.
The initial British Government reaction to the Brandt Report was cool, if not frigid. In part in response to the unexpected upsurge in public opinion, the tone of recent official pronouncements has softened.
The change is evident in the extracts from various official statements presented in this Bulletin. But in substance, present British policy remains largely unconvinced by the central ideas and proposals of the Report, even if in some degree it is professedly sympathetic to its objectives.
Part of our intention in compiling this Bulletin is to focus attention on some of the critical issues, especially uncertainty and imbalance in the areas of finance, energy and food security, in order to show the need for international action and to urge a more positive British response.
The world economy is deep in recession, with declining GNP being recorded in most major industrial countries, For developing countries the picture is also bleak, more so than in the mid-1970s when initial recycling, high commodity prices and often rising exports sustained a certain dynamism in a number of countries.
The prospects for the 1980s in most of the poorer developing countries, but especially in Africa, are extremely dismal. In all these respects the position today, and the prognosis, look even more serious than when the Brandt Report was published a year ago.
Volume 12 Number 1 January 1981
Edited by: Martin Godfrey
If the 1970s (in contrast to the optimistic 'sixties) were the decade of pessimism, in academic circles, about the prospects for capitalist development at the periphery, then it was the diffusion to the rest of the world of the gloomy views of the Latin American dependency school that was largely to blame. Soon, however, the pendulum began to swing in the opposite direction in recent years the dependency approach has come under sustained attack in the literature cg Warren 1973, Lall 1975, Leys 19771, and its predictions have ostensibly been challenged by the rapid economic growth achieved recently by a number of underdeveloped countries, such as Brazil, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan.
This issue of the Bulletin looks at the question of whether the dependency approach can now in fact be pronounced dead. It consists partly of articles evaluating either the approach in general or the work of particular theorists, and partly of articles considering the implications of the experience and prospects of five reasonably successful peripheral economies; Iran, Costa Rica. South Korea, Singapore and Ireland.
1980: Volume 11
Volume 11 Number 4 October 1980
Edited by: Richard Jolly
The collapse of white domination and the emergence of a freely-elected government in Zimbabwe have brought home the rapidity with which change has occurred in Southern Africa.
It is only five years since the break-up of the Portuguese empire in Africa that led to the independence of Angola and Mozambique, and indeed to a fundamental re-drawing of the political map of the region. These events, too, have shown how baseless were the expectations of those who, until recently, held political power. It was, after all, Ian Smith who said that black majority rule would never come in his lifetime. It is of course dangerous to draw conclusions about the future from the past. We cannot say how long the South African government will be able to continue to temporise about the future of Namibia. And there are innumerable possible scenarios about the future of South Africa itself, ranging from the reinforcement of the existing repressive system, through a process of peaceful change by mutual agreement, to a period of bloody confrontations and violent revolution.
IDS as a development research institute is concerned with the broader impact of these political changes on the pattern of development in the region, particularly as it affects the welfare of the majority of the African population. Our concern is with trying to understand the processes at work.
Our particular emphasis in this number of the Bulletin is on recent changes in a number of Southern African countries - and how they have affected a long-standing preoccupation - one could say, the dominant characteristics of economic and social development in Southern Africa: inequality how has it changed? How is it now maintained? How do those concerned with combating it see the problem? What constraints do they face?
Volume 11 Number 3 July 1980
Edited by: Dudley Seers
When, in 1964, a conference in this field was held in Manchester,1 not many courses on development were being taught. The conference was in fact not so much about problems of teaching as about the subject itself especially whether growth models, derived from the dominant neo-classical school, were appropriate. Since Thomas Balogh, Nicholas Kaldor and Joan Robinson were among those present, the discussion was lively and iconoclastic. The conference was, perhaps in retrospect something of a landmark, the first major occasion on which the then current orthodoxy in 'development economics' was on the defensive.
By the end of the 1 970s, teaching about development had proliferated in Britain. Most universities had established at least optional units on subjects such as 'economics of underdeveloped countries' for undergraduates studying economics or social science, and East Anglia had pioneered a complete undergraduate degree in the subject. Several universities had also established graduate courses. Meanwhile, the subject itself had been changing.
Experience was revealing the limited significance (even dangers) of economic growth in the sense of an increase in some income aggregate. This was becoming sharply distinguished from 'development', which was increasingly seen as a largely political and social process. Consequently,those teaching development economics began to pay more attention to 'social factors'; courses on the 'sociology' of development, etc appeared, and some expressly interdisciplinary ones were established.
Volume 11 Number 2 May 1980
Edited by: John Oxenham
Why is educational reform so difficult to achieve in developing countries?1 In particular, why do programmes of vocational education or attempts to make education relevant to the kinds of lives which the majority of pupils will have to lead, meet with such depressingly small success?
