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Foreign resources and economic development: A symposium on the report of the Pearson Commission
BOOK REVIEWS
Foreign Resources and Economic Development: A Symposium .on the Report Commission. Edited by T. J. Byres. (London: Frank Cass, 1972. Pp. 199. E2.75.) Reviewing this volume gives one a dizzying sense of relativity: in the first place, the book is a collection of reviews of the report of the Pearson Commission, which was itself a review of aid experience, which relied in part on the work of some of those who have contributed to this book. The contributors constantly refer to each others’ (and their own) previous writings, and even (once!) to the present reviewer. Where will it all end? Will this review subsequently be reviewed by one of the authors in this volume: perhaps the Pearson Commission will be resuscitated to review its reviewers. The process epitomizes the whole aid business; a huge superstructure has developed whose ruison d’hre is reaction to and criticism of other members of the entourage. But perhaps that is the definition of intellectual activity: The trouble is that it seems to have little to do with what actually happenswith the flows of international finance, which are after all the substance of aid. Nor has it much to do with what ought to happen-the alleviation of poverty. It might (unfairly) be said that ‘those who can do, those who can’t review’. This would be unfair here because the contributors to this volume were selected precisely because they have contributed originally to the aid debate in the past. This is both a strength and a weakness; all the contributors seem to be rehearsing their previous positions, so that it is difficult to find any new ideas. But this does mean that they have positions to rehearse. The process gives a dijh YUfeeling. Still, one can comfort oneself that this is better than if they had’ all changed places; then there would be an excuse for vertigo. The volume emphasizes the relativity of development economics for a more important reason, and in this respect it justifies reviewing as the only truthful (since openly subjective) form of writing. The authors only agree unanimously on one thing-the weakness of the Pearson Commission Report. They disagree on everything else, on motives and consequences, on aid and private investment. On the main subject-the role of aid-the contributors may be briefly categorized as follows: Pro- (reformed) aid, and/or private investment-Ayre, Lipton and Streeten; anti-aid-Bauer and Yarney, Byres and Griffin. This group might like to be divided into left-wing, anti-market and right-wing, promarket. That division cannot be justified by reference to the arguments-in many respects they are identical. Finally there is Harry Johnson who, in this volume, is surprisingly difficult to classify. Perhaps for this reason he gives the least impression of arguing to a brief; still he could be classified, 1 think, as pro-reformed aid, but realistic about the possibilities of reform. The pro-plusreform authors tend to give the appearance of greater objectivity than the others because their position seems to be one of critical non-dogma. But appearance and reality differ as Lipton and Byres remind us. Lipton argues that we cannot conclude from the apparently self-interested motives of the donors that aid is self-interested: ‘The motive of one’s action is only distantly, if at all, related to its consequences’-a statement which, if taken seriously, has frightening consequences not only for social scientists but also for
61
of the Pearson
personal life. But he then (endearingly, but naively) belies his own statement with ‘Nobody who knows the aid professionals-men who believe at least as deeply in Christianity and cost-benefit as in capitalism-can seriously argue they would wittingly or unwittingly be used as pawns in a game of aid-as-exploitation.’ (Logically, this is wrong. Wittingly, maybe; but if unwittingly, strong beliefs in Christianity and even cost-benefit analysis do not provide a cast-iron guarantee. In any case, modern Christianity and costbenefit analysis have very good claims to being part of the superstructure of capitalism.) Incidentally, it is worth quoting the contrasting treatment of cost-benefit analysis of Harry Johnson: ‘there is some danger that the emerging popularity of “cost-benefit analysis” will lead to more scarce resources being devoted to the allocation of funds and less and less being available for the projects themselves. It is a well-known characteristic of bureaucracies that the less money they have to spend the more time and effort they devote to deciding exactly how to spend it.’ Byres’s treatment of appearance and reality is very different (‘false consciousness’). Whereas Lipton believes that exploitative motives hide virtuous consequences, Byres describes the apparently virtuous motives which disguise essentially exploitative relationships. How are these manifold contradictions to be resolved? The Popperian might turn to the evidence, but the evidence, as is abundantly clear from these essays, is open to many interpretations, and is contradictory, anyway only derived from the past unreformed situation, which all agree to be bad. A Marxist might get some guidance from the sociotconomic origins of the investigators. Streeten starts promisingly in this respect: ‘Social scientists rarely investigate the social origins of their own interests and doctrines’, but does not fully follow it up. He (along with many others) tends to fall into the trap of believing that making this sort of statement-and indeed trying to elucidate these originsitself removes bias. In any case, a class investigation of the individual contributors would give one little to go on. In perhaps the most important respect they have one characteristic in common: they were all educated and have respectable jobs within the developed capitalist system. Their differences are not systematically related to their views; for example, among the two North Americans one is anti-aid from a left-wing point of view, the other pro-market and reformed aid. It is tempting to turn to the argument itself to resolve the matter. But bad arguments can be advanced in favour of correct views and conversely, as is evidenced here. The quality of argument is less closely related to the truth of the position, than are motives to consequences. The question appears to be one of political economy: one is swayed by those arguments that one finds most sympathetic from the standpoint of one’s general view of the world and development. This volume provides ammunition for the committed rather than enlightenment for the puzzled. But does this leave no room for truth in this area? It seems to me that the questions raised by the Pearson Commission, and its reviewers, are too broad to admit of
WORLD
62 aue
Very roughly they are trying to answer the is aid a GOOD thing? The question is to answer, and irrelevant. Relevant questions determines the nature of flows of finance and between countries; what are the consequences flows for particular groups of people in and developing countries? Actions in both and underdeveloped countries are not by what groups of experts believe about
ansWm.
quation: impossible are: what personnel of these developed advanced determined
DEVELOPMENT
good and bad, but by the interests and the VICWSof the decision-makers and by the constraints that they face. Experts’ views of this kind play a very subsidiary role. It is this sort of area which the academics s;lould explore, if they wish to illuminate the world, rather than their own disagreements. Frances Stewart Queen Elizabeth House, Oxford.
Contributors
Bcrumld Ii. asate1 Bertrand H. Chhtel was born in France in 1920. He was previously Engineer at the European Space Research Organization (ESRO). and is currently Chief of Science Applications at the Office for Science and Technology, United Nations. New York.
LOUIS Lefebcr Louis Lefebcr was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1924. He’was educated at the Trefort School of the P&n&y Peter University and the Economics Faculty of the J6zsef Nklor Technical University of and obtained his Ph.D. in BudPee=. economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1957. He held teaching positions at Harvard. M.I.T. and Stanford. Currently he is F. C. Hecht Professor of Brand&s Economics at International Uniwnity (on leave) and Professor of Economics at York University in Canada. His publications include monographs on planniryr and development as well as articles in professional journals and contributions to volumes of essays. He has frequently been consultant to various United Nations agencies, the Panamerican Union, governments of various developing countries in Asia, Latin America and Africa. He also was Ford Research Fellow as well as visiting scholar at the Institute of Economic Delhi University, and other Growth, acrdcmic institutions.
John Wells John Wells was born in 1947 and graduated from Cambridge in 1969 with a 1st class degree in Economics. He worked and studied in Berkeley, California, where he was awarded the MA. degree in Economics. He is presently working as Research Officer in Economics at the Cambridge Centre for Latin American Studies, and is enpgd in work for a doctoral dissertation in Brazilian economic growth during the 1960s. His other published work has considered the role of recent changes in the availability of international financial capital in the attainment of Brazil’s very high rate of growth and has contained more general interpretations of the Brazilian ‘miracle’.
Dharma Kutrur Dharma Kumar is at present Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies in the University of Sussex. She has worked in the Reserve Bank of India, the Ministry of Finance, the Indian Council of World Affairs, the Institute of Economic Growth, the Delhi School of Economics and the World Bank. Her publications include Land and Caste in Soutb India and India and the European Economic Ccmmuntiy.
Guy B. Gresford
Michael Sharpston Michael Sharpston is a native of Britain, but has also lived in East and West Africa, Latin America and the United States. After Winchester and Cambridge, and odd jobs as a stock clerk and teacher of Latin in Brazil, he worked as an economist in the British Ministry of Overseas Development, where he conducted a study of the UK technical assistance programme. He then became a member of the Harvard University Development Advisory Service team in Ghana. working on import licensing and health. Subsequently, he lectured in development economics at Cambridge and did research into industrial technology at Oxford. He has written articles in academic journals on health and on international sub-contracting, and is preparing a book on effective tariffs. He has also broadcast and written popular articles, and acted as a consultant to the International Coffee Organization and to the World Bank. He is now a staff member of the World Bank in Washington, D.C.
Guy B. Gresford was born in Sydney. Australia, in 1916. Between 1941-2 he was employed as Research Officer in the Division of Industrial Chemistry at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization. In 1942 he became Officer in Charge of the Australian Scientific Liaison Office in London. Between 1947-66 he held various science administration posts at the Head Office of CSIRO, Australia. and in 1966 he became Director for Science and Technology in the UN Department of Economic ind Social Affairs, and Secretary to the UN Advisory Committee on the Application of Science and Technology to Development. Since the end of 1973 he has held the position of Senior Adviser on Science, Technology and the Environment in the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs. He is a Fellow of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute and of Harvard University (Harkness Fellow of the Commonwealth Fund of New York, 1957).
Foreign Resources and Economic Development: A Symposium .on the Report Commission. Edited by T. J. Byres. (London: Frank Cass, 1972. Pp. 199. E2.75.) Reviewing this volume gives one a dizzying sense of relativity: in the first place, the book is a collection of reviews of the report of the Pearson Commission, which was itself a review of aid experience, which relied in part on the work of some of those who have contributed to this book. The contributors constantly refer to each others’ (and their own) previous writings, and even (once!) to the present reviewer. Where will it all end? Will this review subsequently be reviewed by one of the authors in this volume: perhaps the Pearson Commission will be resuscitated to review its reviewers. The process epitomizes the whole aid business; a huge superstructure has developed whose ruison d’hre is reaction to and criticism of other members of the entourage. But perhaps that is the definition of intellectual activity: The trouble is that it seems to have little to do with what actually happenswith the flows of international finance, which are after all the substance of aid. Nor has it much to do with what ought to happen-the alleviation of poverty. It might (unfairly) be said that ‘those who can do, those who can’t review’. This would be unfair here because the contributors to this volume were selected precisely because they have contributed originally to the aid debate in the past. This is both a strength and a weakness; all the contributors seem to be rehearsing their previous positions, so that it is difficult to find any new ideas. But this does mean that they have positions to rehearse. The process gives a dijh YUfeeling. Still, one can comfort oneself that this is better than if they had’ all changed places; then there would be an excuse for vertigo. The volume emphasizes the relativity of development economics for a more important reason, and in this respect it justifies reviewing as the only truthful (since openly subjective) form of writing. The authors only agree unanimously on one thing-the weakness of the Pearson Commission Report. They disagree on everything else, on motives and consequences, on aid and private investment. On the main subject-the role of aid-the contributors may be briefly categorized as follows: Pro- (reformed) aid, and/or private investment-Ayre, Lipton and Streeten; anti-aid-Bauer and Yarney, Byres and Griffin. This group might like to be divided into left-wing, anti-market and right-wing, promarket. That division cannot be justified by reference to the arguments-in many respects they are identical. Finally there is Harry Johnson who, in this volume, is surprisingly difficult to classify. Perhaps for this reason he gives the least impression of arguing to a brief; still he could be classified, 1 think, as pro-reformed aid, but realistic about the possibilities of reform. The pro-plusreform authors tend to give the appearance of greater objectivity than the others because their position seems to be one of critical non-dogma. But appearance and reality differ as Lipton and Byres remind us. Lipton argues that we cannot conclude from the apparently self-interested motives of the donors that aid is self-interested: ‘The motive of one’s action is only distantly, if at all, related to its consequences’-a statement which, if taken seriously, has frightening consequences not only for social scientists but also for
61
of the Pearson
personal life. But he then (endearingly, but naively) belies his own statement with ‘Nobody who knows the aid professionals-men who believe at least as deeply in Christianity and cost-benefit as in capitalism-can seriously argue they would wittingly or unwittingly be used as pawns in a game of aid-as-exploitation.’ (Logically, this is wrong. Wittingly, maybe; but if unwittingly, strong beliefs in Christianity and even cost-benefit analysis do not provide a cast-iron guarantee. In any case, modern Christianity and costbenefit analysis have very good claims to being part of the superstructure of capitalism.) Incidentally, it is worth quoting the contrasting treatment of cost-benefit analysis of Harry Johnson: ‘there is some danger that the emerging popularity of “cost-benefit analysis” will lead to more scarce resources being devoted to the allocation of funds and less and less being available for the projects themselves. It is a well-known characteristic of bureaucracies that the less money they have to spend the more time and effort they devote to deciding exactly how to spend it.’ Byres’s treatment of appearance and reality is very different (‘false consciousness’). Whereas Lipton believes that exploitative motives hide virtuous consequences, Byres describes the apparently virtuous motives which disguise essentially exploitative relationships. How are these manifold contradictions to be resolved? The Popperian might turn to the evidence, but the evidence, as is abundantly clear from these essays, is open to many interpretations, and is contradictory, anyway only derived from the past unreformed situation, which all agree to be bad. A Marxist might get some guidance from the sociotconomic origins of the investigators. Streeten starts promisingly in this respect: ‘Social scientists rarely investigate the social origins of their own interests and doctrines’, but does not fully follow it up. He (along with many others) tends to fall into the trap of believing that making this sort of statement-and indeed trying to elucidate these originsitself removes bias. In any case, a class investigation of the individual contributors would give one little to go on. In perhaps the most important respect they have one characteristic in common: they were all educated and have respectable jobs within the developed capitalist system. Their differences are not systematically related to their views; for example, among the two North Americans one is anti-aid from a left-wing point of view, the other pro-market and reformed aid. It is tempting to turn to the argument itself to resolve the matter. But bad arguments can be advanced in favour of correct views and conversely, as is evidenced here. The quality of argument is less closely related to the truth of the position, than are motives to consequences. The question appears to be one of political economy: one is swayed by those arguments that one finds most sympathetic from the standpoint of one’s general view of the world and development. This volume provides ammunition for the committed rather than enlightenment for the puzzled. But does this leave no room for truth in this area? It seems to me that the questions raised by the Pearson Commission, and its reviewers, are too broad to admit of
WORLD
62 aue
Very roughly they are trying to answer the is aid a GOOD thing? The question is to answer, and irrelevant. Relevant questions determines the nature of flows of finance and between countries; what are the consequences flows for particular groups of people in and developing countries? Actions in both and underdeveloped countries are not by what groups of experts believe about
ansWm.
quation: impossible are: what personnel of these developed advanced determined
DEVELOPMENT
good and bad, but by the interests and the VICWSof the decision-makers and by the constraints that they face. Experts’ views of this kind play a very subsidiary role. It is this sort of area which the academics s;lould explore, if they wish to illuminate the world, rather than their own disagreements. Frances Stewart Queen Elizabeth House, Oxford.
Contributors
Bcrumld Ii. asate1 Bertrand H. Chhtel was born in France in 1920. He was previously Engineer at the European Space Research Organization (ESRO). and is currently Chief of Science Applications at the Office for Science and Technology, United Nations. New York.
LOUIS Lefebcr Louis Lefebcr was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1924. He’was educated at the Trefort School of the P&n&y Peter University and the Economics Faculty of the J6zsef Nklor Technical University of and obtained his Ph.D. in BudPee=. economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1957. He held teaching positions at Harvard. M.I.T. and Stanford. Currently he is F. C. Hecht Professor of Brand&s Economics at International Uniwnity (on leave) and Professor of Economics at York University in Canada. His publications include monographs on planniryr and development as well as articles in professional journals and contributions to volumes of essays. He has frequently been consultant to various United Nations agencies, the Panamerican Union, governments of various developing countries in Asia, Latin America and Africa. He also was Ford Research Fellow as well as visiting scholar at the Institute of Economic Delhi University, and other Growth, acrdcmic institutions.
John Wells John Wells was born in 1947 and graduated from Cambridge in 1969 with a 1st class degree in Economics. He worked and studied in Berkeley, California, where he was awarded the MA. degree in Economics. He is presently working as Research Officer in Economics at the Cambridge Centre for Latin American Studies, and is enpgd in work for a doctoral dissertation in Brazilian economic growth during the 1960s. His other published work has considered the role of recent changes in the availability of international financial capital in the attainment of Brazil’s very high rate of growth and has contained more general interpretations of the Brazilian ‘miracle’.
Dharma Kutrur Dharma Kumar is at present Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies in the University of Sussex. She has worked in the Reserve Bank of India, the Ministry of Finance, the Indian Council of World Affairs, the Institute of Economic Growth, the Delhi School of Economics and the World Bank. Her publications include Land and Caste in Soutb India and India and the European Economic Ccmmuntiy.
Guy B. Gresford
Michael Sharpston Michael Sharpston is a native of Britain, but has also lived in East and West Africa, Latin America and the United States. After Winchester and Cambridge, and odd jobs as a stock clerk and teacher of Latin in Brazil, he worked as an economist in the British Ministry of Overseas Development, where he conducted a study of the UK technical assistance programme. He then became a member of the Harvard University Development Advisory Service team in Ghana. working on import licensing and health. Subsequently, he lectured in development economics at Cambridge and did research into industrial technology at Oxford. He has written articles in academic journals on health and on international sub-contracting, and is preparing a book on effective tariffs. He has also broadcast and written popular articles, and acted as a consultant to the International Coffee Organization and to the World Bank. He is now a staff member of the World Bank in Washington, D.C.
Guy B. Gresford was born in Sydney. Australia, in 1916. Between 1941-2 he was employed as Research Officer in the Division of Industrial Chemistry at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization. In 1942 he became Officer in Charge of the Australian Scientific Liaison Office in London. Between 1947-66 he held various science administration posts at the Head Office of CSIRO, Australia. and in 1966 he became Director for Science and Technology in the UN Department of Economic ind Social Affairs, and Secretary to the UN Advisory Committee on the Application of Science and Technology to Development. Since the end of 1973 he has held the position of Senior Adviser on Science, Technology and the Environment in the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs. He is a Fellow of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute and of Harvard University (Harkness Fellow of the Commonwealth Fund of New York, 1957).