“Indicate social determinants of economic development. Discuss any one sociological perspective analysing backwardness and poverty in the developing societies.” (2007)
Capital and technology produce growth only when values, institutions and social relations allow them to work. The first part indicates these determinants. The second takes up the dependency perspective, which reverses the usual question: it looks for the cause of backwardness in a society’s place within world capitalism, not in its own culture.
Social determinants of economic development
- Values and motivation: Max Weber (The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 1905) linked rational capitalism to worldly asceticism. David C. McClelland traced growth to a socially instilled “need for achievement”.
- Openness of social structure: ascriptive hierarchies such as caste restrict occupational choice and waste talent. Achievement-based structures widen the pool of skills.
- State and institutions: Gunnar Myrdal (Asian Drama, 1968) blamed South Asian stagnation on the “soft state”, where laws exist but elites evade them.
- Capabilities and gender: Amartya Sen treats education, health and women’s agency as both the means and the ends of development. In India female labour force participation was still only 40% in PLFS 2025, against 79% for men.
- Networks and trust: kinship and community ties can finance enterprise. Milton Singer found that Madras industrialists kept joint families and ritual life while running modern firms.
The dependency perspective
Dependency theory arose in Latin America in the 1960s against W. W. Rostow’s modernisation model (The Stages of Economic Growth, 1960), which blamed traditional values for poverty.
- Andre Gunder Frank (“The Development of Underdevelopment”, 1966) argued that underdevelopment is not an original condition. The same historical process that developed Europe produced it. A metropolis–satellite chain drains surplus from peasant to local elite to national capital to the core. Satellites grew fastest when their ties to the metropolis weakened, as during the Depression and the world wars.
- Samir Amin described unequal exchange and “peripheral capitalism”. Here export enclaves and comprador elites prosper while the mass of producers stays poor.
- The mechanisms are colonial extraction, raw-material exports traded for manufactures, profit repatriation by multinational firms, and debt.
The Indian case. Dadabhai Naoroji’s “drain” thesis (Poverty and Un-British Rule in India, 1901) anticipated the argument, and the ruin of handloom weaving is its textbook example. A. R. Desai read colonial rule as making India an appendage of British capitalism. After 1991, deeper global integration went with sharper concentration: the World Inequality Lab puts the top 1 per cent’s share at 22.6% of income and 40.1% of wealth in 2022-23, the highest on record.
Limits of the perspective
- It cannot explain the rise of East Asian economies. Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto conceded that “dependent development” was possible, and Immanuel Wallerstein added a mobile semi-periphery.
- It neglects internal structures of caste, gender and landholding. India’s multidimensional poverty fell from 29.17% (2013-14) to 11.28% (2022-23) by NITI Aayog’s estimate, largely through domestic public provision that an external-drain model does not capture.
- Its economism leaves little room for local agency and social movements.
Conclusion
Dependency theory rightly historicises poverty and exposes the victim-blaming in modernisation theory. Yet backwardness is produced where global position meets internal social structure. The determinants above decide how far a developing society can renegotiate its place in the world economy.