Development and Underdevelopment

Helleiner's chapter is divided into two sections: "Immediate Issues: Structural Adjustment," and "Longer-Term Issues: Measurement and Sustainability." In the first section, the author tries to come up with a clear picture of what "structural adjustment" means in terms of development. He gives his own definition:

My meaning relates purely to external balance of payments problems and the necessity of restructuring production toward exports and import substitutes in response to a worsening prospect of external imbalance (38).

Helleiner says that the governments of developed nations and international organizations such as the World Bank have a completely different definition for "structur

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justice in the Third World. If such steps are not taken, however risky they might be for those powerful interests, then the change will come about through violence. He says that these powerful forces still might not take those steps: "Are they too spellbound by their narrowly conceived selfish interests, too blinded by their hatred of progress, grown so senile in these latter days of the capitalist age, as to commit suicide out of fear of death?" (106). In Chapter 7, ~The Development of Underdevelopment," Andre Gunder Frank repeats much of what the other authors in this book have said. He states that historians have concentrated on the developed nations and have ignored the developing nations. Most studies of development have been carried out by Westerners, which means that those studies have suffered from the biases of the developed nations. Frank is certainly critical of this situation, but he says that the problem cannot really be solved by Westerners from developed nations. Only people from developing nations know what it is like to live and suffer in those countries, and only such individuals can accurately show what is going on there and what possible solutions are. In his conclusion he says that All of these hypotheses an
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Approximate Word count = 4732
Approximate Pages = 19 (250 words per page)

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