Development Perspectives for the 1990s

Co-ordination between agencies engaged in policy-based lending is essential. With traditional project aid a lack of co-ordination may be wasteful but it need not vitiate the efforts of donors; with policy-based lendings this degree of tolerance disappears. A recipient government can only follow one set of recommendations for a given policy variable; if those providing advice do not proffer the same prescriptions it will be forced to reject some of them.

In December 1989 the EC and sixty-seven African, Caribbean and Pacific states (the ACP) signed the fourth Lomé Convention in Togo. The Lomé trade and aid arrangements have become a firmly established element in North-South relations since their inception in 1975. One of the central benefits offered under the Lomé regime is concessional aid. Much of the funding disbursed by the European Development Fund (EDF) is in the form of grants and low interest loans. It also entails relatively low conditionality, the EDF’s only stipulation being that it should be spent on EC goods and services.

The recent crises in Africa’s political economy, and the uneasy relationship between the bulk of these countries and the Bretton Woods financial institutions, backed by the Group of Seven (G7) industrialised countries have spawned interesting debates over the linkage between the G7-dominated capitalist world economy (CWE) and the development process in the ‘peripheral’ African countries.

Consider a labour-abundant, capital-scarce, developing economy producing two composite goods, tradeables (T) and non-tradeables (NT). Unless otherwise indicated, it is assumed that all production and imports are for final demand: domestic primary factors are the only inputs. Within each composite category, goods prices are assumed constant until further notice. Those in T are determined by given world levels and the structure of protection, while those in NT are endogenous. Tradeables consist of a resource-based subsector such as mining (R), plus agriculture and manufacturing (AM). It is supposed that the economy is initially heavily dependent on a booming R sector, the entire output of which is exported, but that the relevant minerals approach depletion; in comparative statics analysis only the extreme case of actual depletion is considered. That is the direction in which the key (copper) resource sector of Zambia has been moving. How the structure of the economy is likely to react to such depletion, the difficulties it is likely to face, and some policy implications, are examined. Consideration is also given to a problem in many ways similar to resource depletion — that in which there is substantial permanent shift in the terms of international trade against a resource upon which the economy had earlier been heavily dependent. Zambia has also had to face that dilemma in recent decades. Unless otherwise indicated, it is assumed that both before and after the resource sector shocks, some of each good is produced.

It has been argued that developing countries should liberalise their trade regimes in order to expand production and exports of manufactured goods and consequently enhance their economic development.² While there is no general agreement on the details of trade liberalisation measures, their main elements can be identified as: the removal or conversion to tariffs of import quotas, import licensing and other quantitative restrictions; the reduction of the level and the variability of import tariffs rates and compensatory devaluation of the local currency.

Since the launching of its first five-year development plan in 1962, the Korean economy has grown rapidly. Between 1962 and 1987, per capita GNP in current prices rose from $81 to $2690. During the period, real GNP grew at the rate of over 8 per cent per annum and per capita real GNP at 6.4 per cent. Rapid growth was accompanied by deep structural change. In 1965, agriculture accounted for 38 per cent of GDP, industry for 25 per cent and services 37 per cent. By 1987, the share of agriculture had fallen to 11 per cent, that of industry had risen to 43 per cent and services to 46 per cent. In the same period, the share of manufacturing in GDP rose from 18 to 30 per cent.

The principle of distributing food aid in disaster or famine situations is largely uncontroversial. Most people agree that when starvation is a reality or a threat there is a moral imperative to act, whatever the costs or side effects. However, in practice most food aid is not used in emergencies. It is used to support projects or for commercial sale in non-famine situations. In such uses food aid has for long been controversial and strong negative views about it still persist.

The role of food aid in structural and sectoral adjustment support (SAL) for Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) will be a matter of greatly increased importance over the last decade of this century. This is the result of a convergence of three factors:

The final triumph of the Sandinista uprising in July 1979 led to radical changes in Nicaragua. Agrarian reform has been central to this revolution and so an understanding of it is central to an appreciation of the development strategy followed by the FSLN (Frente Sandinista Liberation Nacional). This chapter seeks to provide such an understanding for the first post-Somoza decade in Nicaragua.

In Haiti, as export crop production has deteriorated and the population continues to expand, particularly into urban centres, ‘the marketing system of food has become the backbone of this poor nation, and of paramount importance for its survival’ (Girault, 1984, p. 177). Essential foodcrops such as corn, sorghum, cassava and beans are almost exclusively the product of a peasantry that continues to encompass the overwhelming majority of the country’s producers and that is ‘squarely planted in a cash economy’ (Murray and Alvarez, 1973, p. 15).

The Canadian Arctic is an underdeveloped region within a developed nation. In many respects — economic dependence, a resource-based economy, limited political power, and ecological damage, among others — the Arctic shares common characteristics with other underdeveloped, often ‘Third World’, regions. The causes of arctic underdevelopment are complex, but have traditionally been analysed solely in economic or political terms. This paper considers this underdevelopment in economic, political and ecological terms, aspects which have been combined in the emerging theoretical framework of ‘sustainable development’.

The woodfuel ‘crisis’ of developing countries was ‘discovered’ in the mid-1970s at the time the world was gripped by the energy crisis that followed the oil price shocks of 1973–4. The scale of deforestation across the Third World was already recognised. As energy analysts and anthropologists began to pile up the evidence across the developing world about the huge scale of woodfuel use and the difficulties that millions seemed to be facing in getting enough wood as tree stocks declined, it seemed natural to regard both types of crisis as essentially similar.

The Falkland Islands have only had a stable settlement since the early 1840s. Following an initial period of dependence on shipping and sealing, from the late 1860s until the mid-1980s, sheep farming for wool was the main revenue source in the islands. In 1867, sheep farming began to make headway on West Falkland and by 1874 the principal occupation of the Falkland Islands was officially described as ‘sheep farming’. In 1850 there were an estimated 7650 sheep in the islands and this figure rose to 435 700 by 1880 and to a peak of 807 000 in 1898. This population was probably too large, and overgrazing of the better pastures may have led to the reduction in numbers of sheep after the turn of the century. The population declined steadily until 1923 when it reached a level of about 630 000 sheep, and approximately this number has been maintained to the present day.

Problems associated with the provision of primary health care (PHC) in a large urban area continue to perplex health planners throughout the world. Drawing on research carried out in Mexico City DF in 1987–8,¹ this paper examines the operational difficulties and problems one Mexican health institution has experienced as it endeavours to provide a PHC system. The health institution under analysis is the Secretaria de Saludridad y Asistencia (SSA). Detailed statistical information is restricted to one part of the DF, comprising the four delegations (political administrative units) of Iztacalco, Iztapalapa, Tlahuac and Venustiano Carranza. These delegations formed the eastern administrative sector of the SSA until 28 February 1988. A resume of other health institutions also operating in the DF is provided by Ward (1987).

According to R. L. Kitchen (1986, p. 122), development finance institutions (DFIs) (or companies) are established in order to ‘provide longterm finance for development projects’. They proliferate in the developing world, are fairly common in industrialised countries and exist supranationally. Particularly in those parts of the developing world traditionally influenced by British banking behaviour, they are deemed to fill important gaps in financial systems where commercial banks are reluctant to lend other than on short time scales and where as yet other capital market arrangements may be rudimentary.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the problems of agricultural credit institutions in developing countries with specific reference to Jordanian institutions. A credit institution will often be set up by a government of the Third World to provide investment for the rural sector. This investment is seen as a means of promoting innovation and, therefore, efficiency in the agricultural sector. Through improved efficiency, it is also seen as a means of abating the poverty of farmers.

The Grameen Bank of Bangladesh has been the most widely acclaimed development ‘success story’ of the 1980s. It has grown from a micro-project into the country’s fourth largest bank by providing poverty-alleviating loans to a clientele conventionally regarded as ‘unbankable’. Such experiences are rare, and in consequence the Grameen Bank has been seized upon as a potential model for transfer and replication. It has received high level official delegations from China, Nepal, Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, the Solomon Islands and other countries; has been subjected to detailed studies by several bilateral and multilateral aid agencies; and has been the basis for scores of study tours from nongovernmental organisations (NGOs). Many visitors, some of ministerial status, have subsequently announced that the Grameen Bank should be replicated in their own countries.

As this chapter¹ studies the intersection of various subordinate categories, we begin by noting that dairying is itself a subordinate activity in rural India, ancillary to agricultural production and drawing on crop wastes and residues for milchstock nutrition. With male labour in villages usually directed to agriculture and other primary activities, it is generally the subordinate gender which puts labour into the subordinate activity of dairying. Baviskar (1988) discusses the preconditions for household dairying, and stresses the presence of an able-bodied woman, in addition to finance to purchase a milch animal, land to grow fodder or resources to otherwise acquire it, and suitable shelter.

During the 1970s, India has seen unique new forms of women’s organisations. Whilst during their embryonic stages such organisations were viewed with an element of surprise both in India and the West, they are now regarded as exciting and firmly-rooted, articulating the needs of women from the most suppressed of social and economic classes. Examples include the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) based at Ahmedabad, the Working Women’s Forum (WWF) in Madras and the Annapurna Mahila Mandai (AMM) in Bombay.

It is the contention of this paper that feminist and Muslim fundamentalist women both begin from similar premises where the subordination of women is concerned; it is in their conclusions that the two groups vary considerably. It is therefore necessary to consider the analysis offered by Muslims and consider seriously whether the feminist solutions remain valid even in the cultural and political context of countries such as Iran.