DEVELOPMENT
THE WORLD IS CHARACTERISED BY A WIDE VARIATIONS OF DEVELOPMENT
Defining development...
Development is connected with economic growth ... GDP and GNP...but there are practical and structural difficulties of using such measures. The origins and meanings of 'underdeveloped', 'developing' through to Third, North-South divide, LEDC and MEDC.
The Brandt report
NIC's (newly industrialised countries) and RIC's (reently industiralised countries) are two new terms have now come to describe nation states whose development fits uncomfortably into any of the above categories (strange to call China and India as RIC's given their long history of industrial dominance before Europe began its development!) Asian Tigers (Hong Kong,Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan) having grown at unpresented rates, sistaining growth in GNP at 10% per annum..followed by tiger cubs..Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand.... the formula for success = export lead growth or export valorisation. Case Studies Singapore, Hong Kong.
- Generally ...all NIC's have a high rate of domestic saving, for reasons that may be to do with culture, the devellopment of institutions and economic management.
- good at attracting another source of money for the development of industry ... foreign direct investment (FDI).
- they have been successful in export markets
- invested in development of skills through education and training often with huge government support.
- land reforn and agricultural reform have been important.
Lots of ways to measure development including Happiness =R. Layard (co-director of Centre for Economic Performance at the LSE) or GNP or GDP, HDI...which is today the most commonly used.... and new ways have been devised to measure different aspects of HDI eg... LSMS (living standards measurement survey),CWIQ (core welfare indicators questionnaire) both supported by the World Bank ... the DHS (the demographic and health survey) financed by US-AID, the multiple indicator survey sonsored by WHO and UNISEF.
Development through quantifiable and non-quantifiable (freedom of expression), using a range of social and economic indicators.(Spearman's Rank for correlations between factors).
Enviromental consequences of economic development
Sustainable development = 'meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future genertions to meet their own needs' (contrasting examples needed here)
There are 4 views .... about the relationship between man and the natural world..That nature is robust and can cope with the impacts of man, or fragile and is vulnerable to ecological degredation or resource exploitation, middle view = carrying capacity, ecological footprint, natural resources, environmental debt,inter-generational equity between people alive today and those in the future as well as between different groups of people alive today and finally chaos (nature is essentially random).
- Resources and their impact on development ...Uraguay reliance on them in the 1950's can inhibit broader economic development, oil rich states today fall into this category, while Japan or the Asian city states, demonstrate have 'made it' without local resources.
- Natural resources (essential element to development / it's useful for economic development but can be an obstacle to this dev,
- Material resources and
- Human resources
WITHIN COUNTRIES THERE ARE WIDE VARIATIONS IN ECONOMIC GROWTH AND DEVELOPMENT
Regional theory and Regional polic(MEDC and LEDC) = description of regional variations and an explanation of those variations set in a broader national and global picture.
The rise and fall of regions using manufacturing regions that have experienced decline. social and economic indicators of deprivation also show this .
Brief history of regional policy in appraising the economic, social and political motives for government intervention.(destinctions between direct and indirectmeasures such s infrastructural improvements.) How successful or not these have been .
How disparities have tried to be addressed (often with HEP station) to simulate growth and economic development.
Theories = Myrdal (explaining why regional dispariities persist) = cumulative causation. Frank(dependency theory an American economist whose theory looked at where a country is in the international capitalist economy which is set up in favour of a small number of metropolitan or core countries..dominated by USA, Europe and Japan and then ther exists a whole series of intermetidate places which are simultaneously both core and periphery eg Sao Paulo,then would come the satellite, and lastly ultra-underdeveloped today are those which had the closest ties to the metropolis in the past...so his version of dependency theory is externalist. Friedman etc.
Terminology = Growth Poles, core and periphery, multiplier effect, backwash,etc
DEVELOPMENT IS A PROCESS WHICH CHANGES THROUGH TIME
Rapidity of change in the world economy and the complexity of the debt crisis
The geography of international capital and the impact of change are unifying elements.
Rostow(5 stages take off, trickle down, etc), it is an evolutionalist theory, seeing social and economic change as unfolding through the fixed set of stages. It is unilinear.. all countries having to go through the same set of stages by the same route in the same order. It is internalist... only the developing country itself can control its own development from within, nothing to do with a world system.
Development can have very positive consequences... increases in living standards, seen in many indicators, both social and demographic.
Dependency and economic colonialism, linking to the growth of the world economy and the role of the TNC in this ...producing interdependency of LEDC's on MEDC's and MEDC's on other MEDC's
International trade (positively and negatively) and capital flows
(Structural Adjustment Programmes)
Trade (differences between aid and trade) and commodity price fluctuations
Aid both large scale in LEDC's and smaller scale NGO intermediate technology.
The role of the World Bank, the IMF (international monetary fund) and the World Trade Organisation
The images below illustrate the differences between MEDC and LEDC development .... How can you tell the difference?
.T
The 'City of God' in Rio de Janeiro (favela) LEDC
SYNOPTIC LINK
New York MEDC
