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 any food surplus, and look for ways to transform a country’s agricultural sector. Are they making judgments, imposing their own values? You bet: 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), natural resources and other processed inputs, cheap energy, 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 some cultural baggage when it travels. 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 further compacted already nutrient-poor tropical soils (most of the fertility is held in the vegetation–removing it is like mining topsoil). In others there were terrain problems. The whole idea that a tractor might require an infrastructure was often not taken into account, and in some areas the countryside is strewn with rusted tractors and farm equipment, usually dissected for scrap metal or parts or used by kids as a toy of some sort, and maybe melting into the landscape ever since the time the gas tank ran dry.

And we haven’t even arrived at the gender dimension yet. Often times the technology transfer’s cultural baggage 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. Which seems like the opposite of ‘development.’

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, among humans and the rest of the surrounding living system. 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, religion, 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, and that the stakes affect present and future generations.

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 (that come from the government) don’t always represent everyone –Sometimes in fact 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 or race or religion that favors its own over others, 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? In fact, at US consumption rates, the world would be using up resources unsustainably for 1.5 billion people, in stead of the 7-plus billion the planet currently accommodates.

• 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

Dudley 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 individuals’ 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 fulfillment (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 this bare minimum level might appear, there is not a country on earth that has been able to secure these for all of its citizens. Well, maybe Lichtenstein.

Seers’ ideas are not widely accepted (any ideas why not?). He’s offering a critique of economic development as it is often conceived and practiced (back to the GNP and GDP). But measures of national income don’t reflect some important sectors in the economies of developing countries:

• 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. If this is hard to wrap your head around, imagine having to place a value on women’s work were the household required to pay for domestic economic needs.

• 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, would less people bother investing in human capital, in job skills, becoming doctors, professionals, etc.? Who would risk opening a business if it were taxed at rates that kill any profit incentive? 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 public higher education if people are going to take their skills and talents and emigrate?

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.

Seers, Dudley. 1979. The meaning of development. Pp 9-30 in D. Lehmann (ed) Development theory: Four critical studies. London: Frank Cass.