listic economics. It is the view of the author that this approach to "structural adjustment" will not aid the development of the nations of the Third World. Helleiner says that this traditional approach focuses on the needs of developed nations, and ignores the needs of developing nations. He says also that the developed nations have not yet recognized the fact that their own economic fate is deeply connected to the fate of the Third World.
Helleiner says that part of the failure of the developed nations' effort to help development in the Third World has been a simple failure of will (41). As soon as development policies seem to be inefficient, they are abandoned by the developed nations. The author says that unconventional approaches need to be given time before they start bearing fruit in terms of production and efficiency.
One of the problems with the development plans of the developed nations is that international organizations which are controlled by those countries---such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fun---are tied by their "articles of agreement" to follow economic policies which do not fit the needs and situations of the developing nations. The "liberal, market-oriented approaches" of these organizations are effective in some situations, but in many situations they are not appropriate for developing nations. What is needed is a set of alternative approaches, such as those set forth by Krugman:
His advocacy of simple policy rules would permit lots of alternatives short of overall free trade, including, say, across-the-board industrial protection, a strictly limited number of infant industry subsidies, and across-the-board incentives for nontraditional exports (44).
Such alternatives must be found in every area of development in the Third World, including export expansion, external private capital, financial liberalization, and interest rates. In order to find these alternatives, there needs to be m...