Central to the following discussion is the assertion that a foreign trade policy which maximizes the static efficiency gains from trade may result in reduced dynamic or X-efficiency and thus impair a developing country’s development potential. The dominant view of the relation between...

Development failures are less the result of “natural” short-comings, but are caused instead by false conceptions and by the misapplication of experience from highly-developed economic systems to countries in the initial development stage. The following article points out the pit-falls and...

At the close of the Second Development Decade, 1971–1980, the Third World was able to record significant achievements in industrialization and external trade. But the army of jobless has swollen further; the urban slums have grown larger; and famine has claimed more, not fewer victims. The...

The contrast between industrialized and developing countries is often seen as one between two opposites: Rich countries—poor countries. But the poverty in the developing countries is by no means identical with the need for help as perceived in the industrialized societies. Poverty in the Third...

Formerly an active supporter of the western industrialized countries’, and particularly Sweden’s, policy of development aid, Gunnar Myrdal has in recent years become increasingly critical of the present form of aid. In the following paper the Swedish Nobel Prize winner presents his case for...

Both free trade and protectionism have been proffered as prescriptions for Third World development but neither has carried universal conviction. Neither import substitution nor export promotion strategies have come up to expectations. The author advocates a limited measure of delinking from the...