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PDM 212 Semester Summary
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A descriptive summary of the first five chapter of Theories of Development
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Public and development management 212Notes to self
**NB** ->> READ PG16 TO 25 <<- **NB**
Chapter 1 – Growth versus Development
“Development” means making a better life for everyone, and in the present context of a highly uneven
world in terms of income, a better life for most people still means, essentially, meeting basic needs:
sufficient food for health; a safe healthy place to live; affordable services available to everyone; and
being treated with dignity and respect. THESE NEEDS ARE BASIC TO HUMAN SURVIVAL. Development
understood as a better life is a powerful emotive ideal because it appeals to the best in people, and
what might be called the ‘discourse of development’ (the system of statements made about
development) has the power to move people – to affect us immediately and to change us forever;
therefore, development can be used for many different political purposes, including some, and perhaps
most, that conflict with its essentially egalitarian ethic. DEVELOPMENT IS A FOUNDATIONAL BELIEF
UNDERLYING MODERNITY. In development, all the modern advances in science and technology, in
democracy and social organization, in rationalized ethics and values, fuse into the single humanitarian
project of deliberately and cooperatively producing a far better world for all people. Economic growth
means achieving a more massive economy – producing more goods and services on the one side of the
national account (gross domestic product [GDP]) – and a larger total income on the other (gross national
income [GNI]). Economic growth essentially occurs when more productive resources (land and
resources, workers, capital plant and equipment) are employed to produce more goods and services;
but economic growth can occur without touching problems like inequality or poverty when all the
increase in income goes to a relatively few people. The “trickle down” theory (everyone benefits from
growth as portions of the income eventually trickle down from the rich), are not convincing, except to
those already convinced by their complete allegiance to an elite society; for both social and
environmental reasons, growth is justified only when it also produces real development – when it
satisfies essential needs that are presently not being met. This suggests, development is interested not
so much in the growth of an economy but rather the conditions under which production occurs and the
results that flow from it. IF GROWTH CONCENTRATES WEALTH IN THE HANDS OF A FEW, IT IS NOT
DEVELOPMENT.
1. If the growth process is controlled by a few powerful people rather than the many people who
work to make it possible, IT IS NOT DEVELOPMENT.
2. If growth means subjecting the world’s people to an incessant barrage of consumption
inducements that invade every corner of life, IT IS NOT DEVELOPMENT.
3. If growth is the outcome of the market processes that no one controls – although a few people
benefit, IT IS NOT DEVELOPMENT.
Development is optimistic and utopian – it means changing the world for the better, starting at the
bottom rather than the top. Development embodies human emancipation in two distinct senses,
,namely, liberation from the variations of nature through greater understanding of earthly material
processes as usefully modified by carefully applied technology, and self-emancipation – that is, control
over one’s social relations, conscious control over how human nature is conceived, and rational and
democratic control over one’s cultural proclivities. In both the external and internal senses,
development encompasses economic, social, and cultural progress including, in the last case, finer
ethical ideals and higher moral values. Developmentalism is a battleground where contention rages
between bureaucratic economists, Marxist revolutionaries, environmental activists, feminist critics,
postmodern skeptics, and radical democrats.
The Geography of Development
Geography looks at two interrelated aspects, or characteristics, of human life:
Nature – the relations between societies and environments.
Space – the regional variations in societal type and the relations across space among these
regionally disparate societal types as well as the broad tendencies toward global
metaformations.
The chief connection between the two aspects of geography (nature and space) is that regional
variations in human characteristics are essentially produced by different modes of socially transforming
nature. Societies with different types and levels of development interact significantly through POWER
relations – that is, most obviously, societies with large economies tend to dominate those with smaller
ones. The degree or extent of material development (EG. Particularly the standard of living) varies
widely from one place to another. Different levels of material life entail entirely different life chances for
individuals born at various places on the earth’s surface – in some places children almost automatically
survive their traumatic first months, while in other places death arrives so often as to be treated as
normal. Existence has universal qualities of life and needs as well as particular qualities or characteristics
of livelihood and life chances; real differences in the mode of life – differences that arise from variations
in the types and levels of development – are what geographers try to understand as their specialized
task of social science.
Measuring Growth and Development
Development is important because it produces an economy (and more broadly a society and culture)
that determines how people live – in terms of income, services, life chances. “DEVELOPMENT” IS
CONVENTIONALLY MEASURED AS ECONOMIC GROWTH AND THE LEVEL OF DEVELOPMENT IS SEEN IN
TERMS OF “SIZE OF ECONOMY”. The size of an economy, under what is called the “income approach”,
derived from totaling the wages, rents, interest, profits, non-income charges, and net foreign factor
income earned by the country’s people – thus, the gross national income is basically what everyone
earns. Gross national product (GNP) is the total value of final goods and services produced in a year by
the factors of production owned by a country’s nationals (including profits from capital held abroad).
Nominal GNP measures the value of output during a given year using the prices prevailing during that
year. Real GNP measures the value of output adjusted for inflation and changes in “real GNP” is the
,figure usually used to express growth. Gross domestic product (GDP) is the market value of all officially
recognized final goods and services produced within a country in a year or over a given period of time –
it has a somewhat different theoretical base than GNP. The higher per capita production or income, the
more “developed” a country’s people are conventionally said to be and the higher the annual growth
rate in GNP per capita, the more rapidly a country is said to be “developing”. Class, ethic, gender, and
regional differences also conspire to assure that incomes are distributed extremely unequally within
each country. Roughly 9% of the world’s richest inhabitants extract half of the world’s income, while the
poorest 50% are able to only receive 7% of total global income; both geographic location and class
conspire to produce inequality so severe that one wonders how long global society can continue to
countenance such inequality. One of the great unmentioned facts about global income distribution is
that poverty results from extreme inequalities; poor people are poor because rich people take so much
of the income that the economy produces.
**# The Gini index is the most commonly used measure of income inequality, in which 0 represents
perfect equality (e.g., each person having exactly the same income) and 100 perfect inequality. #**
Alternative Benchmarks
This whole discussion, however, refers to income and economic growth as conventionally understood –
although discussions of inequality are usually left out of conventional accounts. An alternative summary
measure that takes these into account is the Human Development Index (HDI) calculated by the United
Nations Development Program (UNDP); this measure derives from a different conception of
development than usual – what the UNDP calls “enlarging people’s choices”, especially in terms of
access to knowledge, nutrition and health services, security, leisure, and political and cultural freedoms.
The HDI measures development in terms of longevity (life expectancy at birth), knowledge (adult literacy
and mean years of schooling), and income sufficiency (the proportion of people with sufficient resources
for a decent life). An interesting variant is the HDI adjusted for inequality (IE. Higher inequality reduces
human development); countries with the highest HDI are Norway, Australia, Sweden, Netherlands, and
Germany (USA = 16th / UK = 19th) and the countries with the lowest HDI are Chad, Nigeria, and the DRC.
The UNDP optimistically concludes that human development can be achieved through the promotion of
“more equitable” economic growth and more participatory democratic practices.
Criticisms of Development Measures
Two kinds of deficiencies in the official data on both growth and development:
1. Not only do these data vary greatly in reliability from country to country, but also such factors
as production, income, or education are in fact culturally specific rather than universal. GDP
measures that part of production sold for a price in a formal market – but not products
consumed within the family nor services exchanged informally, and thus, a major portion of the
economic activity in many 3rd world countries is either ignored completely or simply estimated.
The “official” economy, whose measurements serve as the main indication of growth, may be
only a minor part of the real economy, whose true measurements are unknown. The “shadow
, economy” includes all market-based legal production of goods and services that are
deliberately concealed from public authorities to avoid regulations. Critics conclude that official
GNP and GDP figures measure economic modernization only in the prejudiced sense of how
closely a country replicates the characteristics of the West rather than how well it manages its
affairs in the indigenous senses of the term; increase in GNP per capita, energy use, or
education may reflect an increase in the proportion of activity occurring in the organized, taxed,
market sector of an economy rather than in the informal sector. While GDP may measure
quantitative change in market production (economic growth), it is just a gross indicator of the
qualities of domestic production. Average (mean) figures such as GDP per capita or the number
of potential patients per physician may hide enormous differences among groups within
countries, as likewise between classes or genders, or between rural and urban populations.
Means are meaningless in terms of representing the real situation in a society; medians might
be a better measure.
2. We move to a more profound criticism of the use of GNP and GDP data to measure
development, even after allowing for the unreliability and insufficiency of much data, the
conclusion drawn from income figures are typically suspect theorists intensely skeptical about
modernity, development, progress and the related notions previously taken for granted in the
post enlightenment world. The argument is increasingly made that such GNP per capita and
even more benign statistical devices such as the HDI have nothing whatsoever to do with
variations in the quality of life. Statistical tables of GNP per capita and even tables of happiness
can be seen as instruments of power rather than as neutral methods of measurement; this is
because a comparative series implies a hierarchy – a kind of league table – with a ladder
reaching from bottom to top that would be climbed by people and countries aspiring to
“develop”. High per capita GNP, reached through economic growth, becomes the objective of a
society’s best efforts, and the economic and political methods used in the past by rich countries
become development policy for aspiring poor countries now, with “success” measured by
changes in tabular rankings. People are not statistics but rather are living beings, they might
point out that there is an underlying contradiction that, as GNP increases, resource use and
environmental damage increase even faster, with such proven consequences as global warming
and climate change, destruction of the protective ozone layer, and El Nino effects exacerbated
by warmer ocean currents and out of control CO2 emissions in “economically advanced”
countries. High GNP per capita may ultimately entail cultural blind-sightedness and
environmental degradation.
The Faces of Poverty
Sometimes we use statistical data to discuss growth, development and poverty; as a scientific tradition
that values statistical data as the way of proving statements – showing them to be “true” in the sense of
accurately representing reality. When we think of unequal development and the poverty this produces,
we ourselves do not think primarily in figures. Distanced contemplation through the dry data of statistics
encourages the institutional manipulation of poverty.
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