The Left Adrift

Abstract

begins bravely: The left is dead; long live the left. Rapley, a political scientist who teaches at the University of the West Indies, is an Africa specialist best known for his work on the Ivory Coast, one of the few economic success stories in sub-Saharan Africa. His useful new book takes the form of a historical survey of development thought and practice from the 1940s to the present. Chapter 1 starts, appropriately, with the British economist John Maynard Keynes, whose early twentieth-century ideas promoting government spending to restore prosperity in the industrialized world inspired the first generation of development economists after World War II. Rapley then describes the views of the 1950s structuralists, trade pessimists who believed that the secular trend in the terms of international trade favored the industrialized North over the developing South. They designed the strategy of substitution industrializationgovernment encouragement of manufacturing by private firms for the domestic market-to counter this trend. Chapters 2 and 3 chronicle the limitations and failures of import substitution in practice and its replacement by a less statist, more market-oriented approach. Although successful at building factories and infrastructure, import substitution did not free developing world economies from dependence on manufactured imports or raw materials exports. It also allocated resources inefficiently, created few jobs, neglected agriculture, and led to increased corruption by government officials and the business people favored by government policies. Many economists blamed these failures not just on import substitution but on excessive state intervention in the economy in general. These critics advocated a shift to a strategy of export-oriented industrialization, in which domestic entrepreneurs and foreign investors would be encouraged to produce manufactured goods for sale in the international marketplace. At the same time, these reformers limited the role of government to providing the macroeconomic essentials. At the deeper level of economic theory, Keynes's pump-priming state interventionism was driven out by the neoclassical monetarism of the University of Chicago's Milton Friedman. In chapter 4 Rapley looks at the consequences of the neoclassically derived structural adjustment policies that the World Bank imposed on many governments in the developing world during the 1980s and 1990s. These measures have included fiscal austerity and disinflationary policies, the privatization of state