Context Of Underdevelopment Research Articles

The state of politics in Africa: The corporatist factor

In the past decade, studies of thestate in Africa have either suggested its pervasiveness in both political and economic life or have concentrated on its nonrepresentative (i.e., undemocratic) nature and its dependence on foreign capital for its survival. This study adopts a different reasoning. It suggests that thestate in African countries should be viewed as grappling with problems of managing society within the context of underdevelopment, a task that is increasingly becoming more difficult given the recurring economic crises on the continent. Politics ofcorporatist organization thus become an attractive option for the state to express its authority and attempt to legitimize its existence.

Academic program ‘failures’ and the vocational school ‘fallacy’: Policy issues in secondary education in Somalia

The controversy over the academic (or more accurately, general) versus vocational orientation of secondary education is an old one, as Foster indicated so dramatically in his oftnoted article, ‘The Vocational School Fallacy’ (Foster, 1965). The nature of the fallacy, as defined by Foster, was the assumption that the failure of academic programs to produce employable graduates justified a shift in the orientation of secondary education toward more explicitly vocational programs. In addition to the inherent non sequitur within this logic (the existence of such failure would be a necessary condition only for review of alternatives, including quality enhancement of the existing programs), the vocational school alternative always is limited in its-probability of success by a variety of factors .within and outside of the educational system. These factors include: (1) inadequate manpower data to allow for the identification of specific occupational needs; (2) shortages of skilled vocational teachers available at the wages offered by the education system; and (3) capital requirements for vocational education, involving necessary machinery and tools. in addition, in most countries the vocational school alternative has faced three further constraints: (1) continuing pressure to use the secondary education programs both vocational and academic to relieve social demand pressures; (2) reduced (or foreclosed) opportunities for vocational school students in tertiary education; and (3) the use of vocational programs as part of a tracking process whereby the best of the student cohort is reserved for the academic stream and only the less scholastically oriented students are encouraged to pursue the vocational alternative. Evidence that the controversy created by Foster’s seminal work still exists is indicated by the volume of literature still being generated by proponents, opponents, and neutral analysts (Grubb, 1984). The debate has been extended into the postsecondary realm in the United States and Europe (Clark, 1983; Debeauvais and Psacharopoulos, 1984; Psacharopoulos and Loxley, 1984). In a recent survey of the developments in the United States, Grubb concludes that: ‘Although vocationalism was intended to establish a closer relationship between education and work, over the long run it leads to an increasingly irrational relationship between schooling and labor markets.’ The relationship is irrational because it assumes that schooling should be responsive to employers’ desires for workers to fill jobs rather than to students’ desires that schooling prepare them for careers and other life choices. In moving from the general context of vocationalisation to the specific one of economic and educational conditions in the least developed nations, the policy analyst gains clarity. The issue of vocationalisation is a critical one in such nations because of the high opportunity cost for government resources and for Ehe life chances of individual students. For this reason, the discussion here will emphasise the context of underdevelopment even though the writers believe that many of the policy conclusions obtained are generalisable to developed economies as well.’

Money in Development: A Monetary Growth Model a la McKinnon

Since Professor Tobin's seminal 1965 contribution Money and Economic Growth, a vast body of literature has developed on exploring the nature of macro-economic interactions between and real phenomenon.' The literature, generally referred to as monetary growth models, is primarily aimed at extending and/or testing the robustness of Professor Tobin's results under a variety of different specifications of both the economic system and how money enters the system (a medium of exchange, a consumer good, a producer good or a store of value). The main results of Tobin's analysis are: (i) the steady state capital-labor ratio in a economy is lower than that in a non-monetary economy, and that (ii) the authority can, by increasing the rate of growth of money supply, raise the steady state capital-labor ratio. The literature refers to these results as the non-neutrality of money of the first and second kind respectively [8, 457-58]. Although Tobin himself makes no such reference, his second result has been deployed in the development literature as a policy prescription for inducing, through an expansionary policy, a higher rate of capital accumulation in the less developed economies [8, 458; 5; 14; 10]. Notwithstanding the problems encountered in treating capital accumulation as the sine qua non of economic development, the analytics and resultant propositions of growth models may not be extended in a straightforward manner to apply to the developing economies, for the validity of the relevant propositions rests on a number of assumptions that are unlikely to be satisfied, namely, the full employment of labor, perfect factor markets implying in particular the existence of organized markets for primary securities, etc. While a number of other contributors have touched on the subject, McKinnon [13; 14] and Kapur [10] seem to be the only ones that have genuinely attempted to extend the analysis to the context of underdevelopment [17; 15; 5]. Although Kapur does make a fuller use of the usual analytics of the

Patrimonialism

During the last decade, the concept of patrimonialism has become firmly embedded in political science and the sociological literature, being used primarily to explain the operation of bureaucracies in the underdeveloped world. This research note examines some of the usages of the term and attempts to assess its explanatory value. It is suggested that, as employed in much recent literature, “patrimonialism” has not contributed a great deal to the understanding of underdeveloped polities. The author argues that this is primarily because the literature has generally ignored the broader structural factors of which the phenomenon of patrimonialism is a manifestation. Taking account of these structural factors and locating patrimonialism within the broader context of underdevelopment will better equip us to understand the character and operation of Third World bureaucracies.