Growth and Fluctuations of Fiji's Exports, 1875-1978

Abstract

At a 1975 conference devoted to the development problems of small island economies, a paper addressed to the familiar theme of export dependence and economic instability came to the general conclusion that small countries are highly sensitive to external disturbances.' One of the commentators on the paper disputed both the conclusion and what he held to be an implicit assumption that the external shock waves breaking over island economies are of greater magnitude than those affecting large economies.2 On the basis of a cross-sectional analysis of 44 less developed countries, Erb and Schiavo-Campo had indeed concluded that at least in 1954-66, a relatively large less developed country had a much greater chance of being characterized by relatively low instability of merchandise exports than had a relatively small less developed country.3 They had also cautioned, however, against generalizing any finding on export instability, including their own findings, to the whole of development experience. In the early debate on export instability and economic development, many statements of the instability thesis went so far as to imply that less developed countries invariably have highly unstable export earnings, and that they all suffer significantly from such instability. In its needed efforts to counteract this untenable proposition, the instability antithesis all too often fostered, purposely or inadvertently, the impression that export instability is never an important obstacle to the economic progress of poor countries. The more recent literature has abandoned the impossible level of geographic and conceptual aggregation of the earlier debate in two important ways. First, the export instability propositions have begun