Common understandings (understanding that sometimes, understanding isn’t so common)

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 might be considered a ‘developing’ country. For instance, out of $49 billion appropriated for foreign aid in 2016, here are some breakdowns by region:

source: US Information Agency

This suggests a couple of things: the assistance isn’t always humanitarian, sometimes it carries strategic political goals that could actually exacerbate global inequalities, and it isn’t spread evenly across 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 (click on the ‘development per capita header, sort from highest to lowest).

2. It’s replicable–historically and geographically (industrialization, modernization)–just follow the formula.

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

     • 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, often using labor-intensive technologies, and are therefore dependent upon labor and large family size. In addition, most agrarian societies cannot depend on the state (the government) 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.

1. • 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 (but enormous amounts of fossil fuels). 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 begins to concentrate, because of the increased investment necessary to take advantage of the economies of scale). 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, conventional (establishment) theory presumes that if the industrialized countries could do it, every country could. Maybe you’ve read that book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Empires? 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 systematically exploited 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, 2000). 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 to ponder:

4. • If not ‘development’, what are standard economic measures showing us?
   • Are people on average doing better if a country’s GDP and GNP are rising?
   • What other kinds of measures seem important 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. If it ends up making your head hurt, maybe you’ll better understand why people are always claiming there’s some ahistorical shortcut or cookie cutter formula.

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. A rising tide floats all boats (so say the boat owners). 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 any women in a household, much less all of them.

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 (cigarettes, music, a bicycle), 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 has increased. If we measured learning in the classroom in aggregate numbers, it might not reflect important differences 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 that justifies, in economic terms, these aggregate measures.

And there you have it. A woefully inadequate introduction to the meaning of ‘development’. Which we’ll proceed to conceptually pick apart in the ensuing weeks. As officially defined, as practiced. That promise, unfulfilled. And now we’ve briefly covered 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!), 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?

. . . the plot, like a thin gruel, thickens.