Discuss the Third World perspective on the causes and cures of underdevelopment.

Discuss the Third World perspective on the causes and cures of underdevelopment. (1993)

Modernisation theory, classically Walt Whitman Rostow‘s The Stages of Economic Growth (1960), treated underdevelopment as an original condition that every society outgrows by following the West. The Third World perspective reverses this: underdevelopment is produced by a relationship, colonial and then neo-colonial, so its cure lies in changing that relationship and the state’s place in it.

Causes

External and historical

  • Colonial drain and deindustrialisation. Dadabhai Naoroji‘s Poverty and Un-British Rule in India (1901) traced Indian poverty to a systematic drain of wealth to Britain, and Romesh Chunder Dutt documented the ruin of Indian handicrafts; Walter Rodney‘s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972) made the parallel case for Africa.
  • Unequal trade. The Prebisch–Singer thesis (1949–50) held that primary exporters’ terms of trade decline against manufactures; Arghiri Emmanuel‘s unequal exchange showed value moving from low-wage to high-wage economies through ordinary trade.
  • Dependency and world-system. Andre Gunder Frank spoke of “the development of underdevelopment” through metropolis–satellite chains; Samir Amin described peripheral economies as extraverted, built for external demand; Immanuel Wallerstein placed them in a core–periphery division of labour.
  • Neo-colonialism. Kwame Nkrumah (1965) argued that formal sovereignty coexists with external direction of policy, which now operates through debt and conditionality: the World Bank found developing countries paid $741 billion more in debt service than they received over 2022–24.
  • Biased institutions. Weighted voting in the IMF and World Bank, and rules on patents and investment written by the North.

Internal, but colonially shaped

  • Hamza Alavi‘s overdeveloped post-colonial state, a bureaucratic-military apparatus larger than the society beneath it.
  • Amiya Kumar Bagchi (The Political Economy of Underdevelopment, 1982) joined the colonial legacy to agrarian and class structures that keep surplus from productive investment.
  • Frantz Fanon‘s warning of a national bourgeoisie that inherits the coloniser’s place without his productive function; Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto on local elites allied with foreign capital.

Cures

  • State-led industrialisation. Import-substituting industrialisation and planning, as in Jawaharlal Nehru and Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis‘s heavy-industry strategy, with land reform and public investment.
  • Self-reliance and delinking. Amin’s delinking subordinated external links to internal needs; Julius Nyerere‘s Arusha Declaration (1967) offered rural ujamaa; Mohandas K. Gandhi’s swadeshi gave a village-centred variant; Frank called for a revolutionary break.
  • Changing the international order. UNCTAD (1964), the Generalised System of Preferences, commodity agreements, and the NIEO (1974) sought fair prices, technology transfer, debt relief and voice.
  • Collective self-reliance. The Buenos Aires Plan of Action (1978) on technical cooperation among developing countries, the G-77 and South–South trade.
  • Self-correction. The South Commission‘s The Challenge to the South (1990), chaired by Nyerere with Manmohan Singh as Secretary-General, conceded that elite capture and neglected agriculture were partly the South’s own failures.

Assessment

  • East Asia falsified the strong claim: Korea and Taiwan developed through integration, yet by state-directed credit, land reform and export discipline, a structuralist prescription.
  • ISI hit a ceiling of small markets and foreign-exchange shortage; delinking produced stagnation where tried rigidly.
  • Amartya Sen shifts the yardstick from output to capabilities.
  • The agenda lives on in the Global South’s demands on debt, climate finance and technology, and in India’s call for human-centred globalisation.

Conclusion

The Third World perspective was right that underdevelopment is historically made and structurally reproduced, and wrong that withdrawal is the cure. The surviving synthesis pairs international reform with domestic state capacity: changing the rules while building the ability to use them.