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Neoliberalism and Development
Neoliberalism and Development W. E. Murray, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
The terms – neoliberalism and development – are contested: views on interaction between the two turn on one’s political perspective. Neoliberal thinkers believe that the policies that have been diffused across the Global South based on their ideas have brought large benefits, especially in the economic sphere – although some would argue that there have been positive effects in the political and social fields too. There appears to be a mounting body of evidence, however, that suggests that neoliberalism has eroded development prospects, where development is defined as social change toward a situation where people can exercise their full human potential.
Neoliberalism, Globalization, and Development Neoliberalism is an economic, political, and it can be argued, cultural paradigm, which is all but hegemonic at the governmental scale across the globe. Echoing back to early capitalist thinking, neoliberalism argues that governments fail inherently. Such state intervention in the economy causes crowding out and inefficiency leading the capitalist system to function less effectively, lowering competitiveness, and ultimately prospects for economic development. According to neoliberal thinking the most effective way to optimize welfare is through a privatized, deregulated economy that is open to trade and inward investment. This allows comparative advantage to work on a global scale, thus maximizing total global welfare. Neoliberal policy facilitates the linking of processes at different scales articulating the local into the global and vice versa, thereby stimulating greater economic openness and efficiency. In essence, neoliberalism promotes politicoeconomic Darwinism on a world scale, and the model thrives on the notion that only the fittest economic units survive and that the benefits of efficiency gains will eventually trickle down to all members of society. Neoliberalism is a political ideology, promoting negative liberty (freedom to purse individual goals without intrusion from others), which seeks to optimize welfare through operation of what neoclassical economists called the ‘invisible hand’. In the sense that neoliberalism is bound up as part of capitalistic individualism, it is a cultural paradigm, also. Early neoclassical political economy was clear about the central regulatory function of the state, while neoliberalism is far more mistrusting of its role. The culture of neoliberalism forms part of the wider regulation of the capitalist system and is tied to
Western ideas of modernization, civilization, individualism, materialism, accumulation, and rationality. In terms of its relationship with theoretical perspectives on development it is borne of enlightenment ‘doctrines of development’, which have had a major impact on the Global South since the advent of colonialism and through the neocolonial/postcolonial modernization period since World War II. Neoliberal ideas have fed into recent discourses of good governance, which ostensibly have to do with optimizing the rules and interventions that regulate and govern societies and polities, but arguably have had more to do with the advancement of free-market economics, under the cloak of liberal democracy. There is no reason why good governance should have this particular connotation, some might argue that good governance is best exemplified in the ‘developmental state’. For example, arguably the most impressive developmental progress historically has not come through free markets alone but through state intervention and strategic political economy reflecting popular aspirations. However, neoliberal thinkers link state developmentalism at best to inefficiency and at worst to corruption; thus, arguments for rolling back the state have come to dominate policy reform across the world. Neoliberalism is intimately tied to ‘globalization as currently practiced’, that is to say, corporate globalization. It can be argued that the model that has taken hold since the 1980s is the most recent turn in the globalization agenda which has moved through two waves – colonial and postcolonial – which are further subdivided respectively into two phases, mercantilist and industrial and modernist and neoliberalism, respectively. Neoliberalism reduces barriers to economic flows which opens doors to investment and trade. This leads to the greater penetration of transnational corporations (TNCs) into the Global South and the articulation of peripheral economies into the global capitalist system, often under unfavorable conditions. Globalization has often been used as a synonym for neoliberalism by hyperglobalists who argue there is no alternative. These are really just arguments for a particular model, which is masqueraded as inevitable, that are designed to further the self-interest of those that promote it. As geographers well know, there are many different possible globalizations and the neoliberal model can and is being resisted from the grassroots upward. The reign of neoliberalism and the spell it has cast on orthodox development thinking need not be everlasting.
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Historical Roots of Neoliberalism – Laboratory Chile The ideas of neoliberalism emanate, in large part, from the University of Chicago’s school of economics and are associated with Milton Friedman and other monetarist economists – although the principles have been elaborated beyond supply-side economics. The history of the diffusion of this specific type of economics is in many ways serendipitous, suggesting that the notion that ‘there is no alternative’ is fallacious. Following the Chilean coup of 1973 the military junta led by Augusto Pinochet had no idea of how to run an economy, but they knew that they wanted to reverse the Chilean ‘road to socialism’ of Salvador Allende’s ‘Frente Popular’ which they had toppled. They called on the services of a number of rightwing Chilean economists who had been trained at the University of Chicago during the late 1960s, some of whom had been sponsored by the anticommunistinspired, US-backed funding program ‘Alliance for Progress in the Americas’. They developed a radical restructuring model based on neoliberal principles and received advice directly from Friedman and economists close to him. The Chicago Boys, as they are now known in Chilean folklore (many of them survive till today and one, Joaquin Lavin, came close to being voted president in 1999 and 2005), recommended aggressive opening of the economy, devaluation, sharp reductions in public service expenditure, and privatization of most nationalized industries. In the event the dictatorship did not privatize copper, as this was important strategically and financially to them; Chile has the largest copper supplies in the world, and 10% of revenues were set aside for the military. In a few short years Chile became the most open and ‘free’ economy in the world. This led to an inflow of foreign investment and, later, a surge in exports of primary products and nontraditional agricultural items destined for the Northern Hemisphere. These flows were largely controlled by foreign firms and often mediated through large economic groupings built in part from the elite families established in colonial times. Chile’s macroeconomic ‘miracle’ came at great social, political, and environmental cost, and some have also questioned the economic performance of the model. Given the attendant cuts in social expenditure combined with the shock exposure to global forces, the socioeconomy was radically restructured. Small business, small farmers, the poor, and generally those most in need suffered grave consequences, furthermore, the natural environment was not accounted for in the new model and sustainability was threatened by the clamor to export vast quantities as quickly as possible. In terms of the model’s stated objectives of lowering inflation, increasing exports and competitiveness the policy was a success and it was
argued that eventually this success would trickle down to the masses if the economy were freed up sufficiently to allow this. Based in part on the macroeconomic success of the Chilean model it was applied in the UK in 1979 under Thatcher, to the USA in 1980 under Reagan, and followed by New Zealand in 1984 as the post-World-War-II welfare consensus was eroded by the recessionary impacts of the oil crisis. The diffusion of the policy across the Global South was made possible through structural adjustment policies (SAPs) applied to the periphery by financial institutions, primarily the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank and later some aid donor agencies and the World Trade Organization (WTO). As explored below, the consequences were devastating to the lives of millions of people. It is instructive that in many cases in the 1980s, neoliberalism was brought in under military dictatorships – in democratic systems in poorer countries they may not have been politically sustainable.
Neoliberalism and the Political Economy of Global Development The neoliberal agenda has supporters in many quarters, not least in big transnational business and rightist political parties and organizations that back it. In academia supporters tend to come from schools of business and management in which social issues are not always at the forefront. Proponents of neoliberalism often argue that the success of East Asian countries – breaking away from primary product production and into high-technology manufacturing, services, and ultimately into the top ranks of the global economy – proves that the theory works. Others have countered that the East Asian model has involved market forces and processes, closely monitored, sequenced, and directed by developmental states that have intervened actively to create the conditions necessary for capitalist growth. In a way, there really is no such thing as pure neoliberalism – all economies are regulated to a degree and deregulation can be conceptualized a ‘reregulation’ toward lower levels of state involvement. There is a continuum between structuralist approaches to development and neoliberal approaches, becoming progressively less interventionist as we move toward the latter. At the scale of the whole globe, the world economy remains mixed. Despite the fact that neoliberalism has been promoted as the solution for development ills in the South, Western countries themselves have continued to protect their agriculture and industry behind high tariffs and quota walls, especially in the European Union (EU), Japan, and the USA. In this sense, the world system exhibits neoliberal elements juxtaposed with highly regulated components designed to promote the interests of
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those that have most influence over the rules of the global economy. In this sense the world economy is in fact highly ‘un-free’ for many, especially as it traps much of the Global South into a primary product producing role which offers very few prospects for long-lasting social and economic progress, in spite of fleeting commodity booms such as that which has characterized the late 2000s. The differences in levels of ‘development’ between nation-states and individuals at the extremes is large and growing. Neoliberalism and the networks it creates increase these disparities. The opportunities for those plugged into the net with the abilities to compete are substantial. However, the gaps are becoming wider and more are falling through them. This has the potential to lead to global conflict. There are thus geopolitical and economic, as well as moral arguments for reforming the system. Indeed, post-September 11th 2001, a number of commentators were arguing that the root cause of the conflict was indeed development inequalities. While this vastly oversimplifies the factors behind the current global instability, it does point to the fragility of peaceful relations under the neoliberal model which is so adept, and indeed is predicated on, concentrating wealth.
The Rolling Out of Structural Adjustment Policies and the Rolling Back of the State in the 1980s and 1990s Neoliberalism has risen to global hegemony at a time when alternatives have been sidelined. The end of the Cold War helped solidify the place of the paradigm across the poor world and was seen as a triumph of rational and democratic values. From the mid-1980s onward neoliberalism eclipsed a range of alternative development approaches, including dependency and structuralism. The backbone of this diffusion has been the rolling out of SAPs and World Bank and IMF loans, which together with some aid flows were made conditional on the implementation of neoliberal policy from the mid-1980s onward. Following the reform of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) one of the principal backers of neoliberal reform has been the WTO, which now has the power to punish signatory countries that fail to deregulate and open their economies, even if they are very poor and industrially underdeveloped, lest social and economic intervention ‘distorts’ international trade. The watershed in terms of the implementation of SAPs was the 1982 oil crisis, which led to the debt crisis (which it could be argued still persists). In the 1970s international lending to poorer countries, on the back of petrodollar deposits generated by the first oil hike in 1973, led to an escalation in debt. At the time, given the expansive money supply, interest rates were low.
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Following the second oil hike however, inflation and recession bit into the Western economies and they used supply-side policies, including interest rate rises to restore equilibrium. These rates filtered through the system and left the indebted nations with enormous debt burdens – in Latin America in the 1980s debt outstripped annual GDP in many countries. In 1982 Mexico defaulted and in response a SAP was imposed on the country in return for a rescheduling and extension of debt. SAPs were heralded as the new path toward economic self-sufficiency and modernization, as opposed to the Keynesian-influenced state developmentalism approach that had dominated since the end of World War II. In reality they were designed to restore stability to and expand the profits of the global financial system upon which the prosperity of the elite in the West and their associates in the South was, and remains, dependent. The adoption was rapid across the Global South – after all, countries had little option but to heed the financial institutions that were in turn funded and driven by Western political and economic powers. By 1990, for example, every Latin American and most African countries had adopted neoliberal policies. In this way the World Bank, and its major backers gained neocolonial power over the economy policy of nation-states. By the end of the 1980s a good deal of the Global South had signed up to SAPs, thus surrendering a substantial level of economic sovereignty to external powers with a very particular worldview.
The Nature of Neoliberal Development Models The nature of SAPs has been relatively constant across time and space – leading to accusations of a ‘one size fits all’ approach to their design. Indeed, even former insiders at the World Bank such as former chief economist, Joseph Stiglitz, have argued this point. Essentially, SAPs contained four cornerstones: (1) ‘downsize’ – reduce taxation and public expenditure to lower deficits and raise incentives for private enterprise; (2) ‘privatize’ – sell off state-owned assets to introduce the profit motive into the economy; (3) ‘deregulate’ – reduce state involvement in order to maximize efficiency and allow the free market to find its natural equilibrium; and (4) ‘globalize’ – reduce protectionist measures, such as tariffs, to allow foreign investment, facilitate the transfer of technology, attain economies of scale in exports, and ultimately stimulate competitiveness on the global stage. In isolation, many of the objectives of SAPs are laudable. The unfortunate reality is that economies have often been launched into a global system in which the industrialized economies have had decades and centuries to evolve their economies; thus, it is enormously difficult for poorer countries to
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participate without becoming locked into low-valueadded production as dictated by comparative advantage. In East Asia this comparative advantage was turned into competitive advantage through selective intervention. In most countries, however, adherence to the model has led to little structural economic progress. If the impacts of neoliberalism in the West in the 1980s were harsh, they were devastating in the South. Poverty and inequality were, by definition already much higher in the periphery and the new policies exacerbated these divisions. It is recognized by both supporters and detractors that there are negative impacts when neoliberal policies are first applied. Austerity is required in order to put SAPs in place. Countries adopting SAPs will experience rising inequality, poverty, unemployment, and informal sector activity in the short term at the very least. Neoliberals have consistently argued that these are merely transitory problems of ‘adjustment’. There is gathering consensus, even among some centrist neoliberals, that empirically this has not been observed. The toughest critics have argued that SAPs have often left countries worse off in terms of holistic development measures, including environmental impacts. Studies have shown that it is often women, children, and the poor that have suffered the most devastating consequences in terms of loss of livelihoods and increased vulnerability. Furthermore, these impacts have been shown to be long lasting. The continued marginalization of the developing world in an economic sense can be empirically illustrated as countries in Africa, and parts of Asia, Latin America, and Oceania continue to lag behind. Partly based on the empirically observed failure of SAPs there has been a shift away ostensibly at least from extreme neoliberalism toward what might be termed ‘third way’ policy in some financial institutions and some countries. The case of Latin America, explored below, illustrates the trajectory from extreme SAPs to ‘neoliberalism with a human face’.
Neoliberalism and beyond in Latin America Arguably, in Latin America, the impacts of neoliberalism have been felt more acutely than anywhere else. Given the depth of the debt crisis in the early 1980s, SAPs were almost universally adopted by the middle of the decade. The combination of the austerity measures accompanying the SAPs and the debt burden itself led to a ‘lost decade of development’ whereby previous gains in living standards were halted or reversed. Across the continent income growth fell to 1.4% on average, compared to 5% for the previous decade, becoming negative in places such as Argentina and Bolivia. Unemployment and poverty rose and inflation skyrocketed in many countries. Due in part to
this economic instability dictatorships maintained or grabbed the reigns of power in many places. Based on SAPs, Latin American countries were encouraged to exploit their comparative advantage which was and is almost exclusively found in primary and agricultural production for export. Despite industrialization gains in the largest markets of Brazil and Mexico based largely on the ISI policies of the 1960s, this policy compounded the region’s historical role as a resource periphery for the global economy. This had regressive developmental impacts including declining long-run terms of trade, Dutch disease (overvalued exchange rates), the evolution of enclave economies, and vulnerability to commodity boom and bust cycles among other things. Neoliberal restructuring had a particularly profound effect on agriculture in Latin America. Most of the Latin American economies have relative cost advantages in agriculture and neoliberalism exploits these. There was a major shift away from domestic, food and traditional production in the 1980s and 1990s, toward exportoriented, exotic, and nontraditional production. Forestry, fisheries, and agriculture formed the backbone of this change. This has had profound impacts in rural localities across the continent as the signals of the global market are transmitted into local spaces. Some such trends provided export opportunities for farmers. For many rural dwellers, however, globalization in the countryside has had negative impacts including loss of land, concentration of ownership, increased vulnerability to external trends, and environmental nonsustainability. Following the end of the Cold War and the implicit, and sometimes explicit, support of the US and its allies of the neoliberal, dictatorships of the 1980s declined. This has led to the watering down of the neoliberal agenda in the continent and the revival – to an extent – of regional cooperation efforts. Throughout the 1990s, given that electorates now had the vote, governments had to make concessions to social policy in ways which some have argued hark back to the structuralist period of the 1960s and 1970s. Designed in order to ensure the political sustainability of the model, this has been termed ‘neoliberalism with a human face’ or ‘neostructuralism’. After the Asian Crash of 1997, an economic downturn occurred which led eventually to particularly harsh outcomes in Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay. The left and center-left blamed this on IMF policies and, more broadly, the neoliberal Washington Consensus. Neoliberals blamed internal factors, especially corruption. This crisis solidified the critique of neoliberalism at all levels of society from the grassroots upward and resistance movements became increasingly heard across the continent. The coming together of popular and political concern about the impacts of neoliberalism has led to a shift to ‘center-left’ politics in many countries from the early 2000s, and the victory of presidential candidates with
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centrist and left-leaning tendencies including among others, Lagos (2000–06) and Bachelet (2007–) in Chile, Toledo (2001–06) in Peru, Morales (2006–) in Bolivia, Lula de Silva in Brazil (2003–), Chavez in Venezuela (1999–), Vazquez (2005–) in Uruguay, and Kirchner (2003–08) and Fernandez de Kirchner in Argentina (2008–) among others. It is certain that in order to win elections in Latin America, it is necessary to adopt a post-neoliberal stance, and this is bound up in part with a desire to distance the continent from the currently highly unpopular United States. Ironically, the USA has meddled politically in Latin America less than ever over the last decade and thus the space to distance countries from it has been created. In the Argentinean election of 2007, the eventual winner, the center-left Peronist-influenced Justicialist candidate, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, campaigned using anti-IMF television advertisements which played on nationalistic feelings. Whether the shifts in policy in Latin America can be termed ‘leftist’ or even ‘center-leftist’ has been called into question. There can be little doubt that the policies of Chavez’s Bolivarian revolution, involving nationalization and poverty reduction, fall further to the left than many of the others, but this has been made possible by the country’s ample supply of oil and thus influence over the global economy. Other ostensibly leftist governments such as that of Morales in Bolivia or Ortega (2007–) in Nicaragua could be viewed as populist. In other cases governments are decidedly centrist by historical and global measures, and despite anti-IMF words of leaders such as Kirchner, they are still very accommodating of the global capitalist system. The free market remains a central pillar, and as a consequence the general model in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil is, in fact, further right than the structuralist-inspired policies of the 1960s. Renovated left leaders (los renovados) have argued that global conditions have changed, ISI policies failed, globalization is here to stay, and that the market can be tempered and optimized. Critics might charge that governments across Latin America talk anti-neoliberalism while still pursing many policies that have been inspired by it. Although in a small handful of economies there has been a shift away from primary product export reliance, in most there has not. The resource curse thesis argues that resource endowment can, under certain conditions, actually be an impediment to development progress – in contrast to more traditional neoclassical and neoliberal ideas. This is the most damaging legacy of the years of pure neoliberalism in the continent and one which the current ‘neostructural’ model – whether we define it as a continuance of neoliberalism or something else – is very unlikely to solve. The spectacular yet ultimately nonsustainable short-term windfalls that are accompanying the commodity boom of the mid-2000s may actually delay the necessary strategic diversification of the Latin
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American economies unless the lessons of economic history in this respect are heeded.
The Future of Neoliberalism – Resistance and Reinvention The Global South has been the site of intense struggles over neoliberalism, and resistance movements abound. There is also a rich vein of development theory that has emanated from the periphery – including dependency and structuralism that still has much to say about the current situation despite the disdain that has been piled on it by neoliberal orthodox economists. There have been international institutional attempts at the government scale to resist and reform including, it could be argued, the formation of trade blocs in the South such as Mercado Comun del Sur (MERCOSUR) and South African Development Community (SADC) – although it could be posited that these merely perpetuate and diffuse neoliberalism further. Other examples include the continued policies of Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), collective action by developing countries against the hypocrisy of Western agricultural policy, and more recently, efforts led by Venezuela’s Chavez to build antineoliberal alliance across the Southern Hemisphere incorporating countries that are out of favor in the West such as Iran and Cuba. Whatever one thinks of Chavez’s attempts in this regard they signal a mounting consensus in the South against neoliberal-inspired ideas and the dominance of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. Over the recent past struggles which go back many decades, have coalesced at the grassroots – at least in the eyes of the popular media – to form the antiglobalization movement. To the extent that such a movement can be discerned it is motivated by a common abhorrence to neoliberalism – or ‘globalization as currently practiced’. There has been growing popular dissent and the formation of transnational nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and new social movements intended to resist neoliberalism. This has been particularly prevalent in Latin America, due to the profound impacts of neoliberalism there, its association with rightist dictatorships, and the history of popular struggle. This is embodied most obviously in the Zapatista movement, which some credit as the foundation of the antiglobalization movement. The lines between antiglobalization, anti-neoliberal, anti-Western, and antiUS ‘movements’ have become increasingly hard to discern. Popular struggles have become far broader than opposing neoliberalism, focusing most recently on the Iraq War, as well as more general antipoverty and pro-environment causes. At the root of many such movements there is a disdain for free-market economics and US-led economic and political dominance which, in the opinion of the
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protestors, has brought regressive impacts across most of the world and underlies specific geopolitical moments such as the War on Terror and the so-called fight for democracy in the Middle East. In the case of lending institutions there has been a marginal tinkering with the policies of the Washington Consensus partly in response to the concerns of new social movements and political change. The World Bank’s approach to development is ostensibly far more rounded than it once was, focusing on broader sustainability in a social and environmental sense, drawing attention to poverty and inequality as embodied in the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers, and promoting the notion of good governance. Notwithstanding, the major institutions such as the WTO and the IMF still pursue an essentially neoliberal doctrine of development. It could also be argued that underlying the World Bank’s ostensibly holistic policy is the core idea that it is free markets, free trade, and competition that are deserving of promotion; the road to this might be slightly altered but the eventual destination is the same. Such shifts then have been largely rhetorical, barely hiding the fact that at the core, development finance is about expanding the influence of capitalism across the globe, opening the ‘emerging’ economies as places for business. This might well bring benefits for some sections of society, but ultimately it is tied up with discourses concerning the inevitability of globalization and the need for poorer countries to embrace it or to sink. Do organizations such as ‘Jubilee 2000’, events such as ‘Live 8’, and endeavors by the UK government to write off the debt of the poorest nations point toward a new popular and parliamentary politics when it comes to neoliberalism and development? Will neoliberalism continue to dominate and thus foster corporate globalization or is it being meaningfully reformed? Can we talk of a shift toward a post-neoliberal development policy? The shifts in Latin America and beyond indicate that extreme neoliberalism is no longer popular in the Global South itself, not that it ever was beyond the elites. Indications are that despite promising superficial signs the underlying approach remains much the same. Neoliberalism is both facilitated by and facilitates globalization. It has allowed the penetration of multinational companies who locate parts of the commodity chain in peripheral areas. Neoliberalism has had the effect of widening income gaps at virtually all scales of analysis and the world economy thrives on this unevenness. It may be that the powerful interests that have colluded to make neoliberalism dominant – big business, conservative politics, and the institutions that represent their aspiration such as the WTO – are difficult to defeat. This raises questions over
what we mean by development, and who should be responsible for defining it and designing policy. Development geographers have a duty to continue to map the impacts of neoliberalism, but more crucially they need to engage directly in the formation of viable alternative models if the inequity and nonsustainability of neoliberal development practice is to be challenged. See also: Anti-Geopolitics; Civil Society; Colonialism, Internal; Debt; Dependency; Desertification; Development I; Development II; Famine; HIV/AIDS in Developing Countries; Intermediate Technology; Neoliberalism; Orientalism; Postcolonialism/Postcolonial Geographies.
Further Reading Auty, R. M. (1995). Patterns of Development: Resources, Policy and Economic growth. London: Edward Arnold. Gwynne, R. N. and Kay, C. (2000). Views from the periphery: Future of neoliberalism in Latin America. Third World Quarterly 21(1), 121--156. Gwynne, R. N. and Kay, C. (2004). Latin America Transformed: Globalization and Modernity, (2nd edn.). London: Arnold. Harvey, D. (2007). A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kay, C. (1989). Latin American Theories of Development and Underdevelopment. London: Routledge. Kelsey, J. (1995). The New Zealand Experiment: A World Model for Structural Adjustment? Auckland: Auckland University Press. Murray, W. E. (2004). Neocolonialism. In Forsyth, T. J. (ed.) Encyclopedia of International Development. London: Routledge. Murray, W. E. (2006). Geographies of Globalization. London: Routledge. Peck, J. and Tickell, A. (2002). Neoliberalizing space. Antipode 34, 380--404. Petras, J. F. (1999). The Left Strikes Back: Class Conflict in Latin America in the Age of Neoliberalism. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Potter, R. B., Binns, T., Elliot, J. A. and Smith, D. (2004). Geographies of Development (2nd edn.). Harlow: Prentice-Hall. Power, M. (2003). Rethinking Development Geographies. London: Routledge. Preston, P. W. (1997). Development Theory. Oxford: Blackwell. Smith, N. (1984). Uneven Development. Oxford: Blackwell. Stiglitz, J. E. (2002). Globalization and Its Discontents. London: Penguin Press. Storey, D., Bulloch, H. and Overton, J. D. (2005). The poverty consensus: Some limitations of the popular agenda. Progress in Development Studies 5(1), 30--44.
Relevant Websites http://www.hdr.undp.org Human Development Report, UNDP. http://www.econ.worldbank.org World Development Reports, World Bank.
The terms – neoliberalism and development – are contested: views on interaction between the two turn on one’s political perspective. Neoliberal thinkers believe that the policies that have been diffused across the Global South based on their ideas have brought large benefits, especially in the economic sphere – although some would argue that there have been positive effects in the political and social fields too. There appears to be a mounting body of evidence, however, that suggests that neoliberalism has eroded development prospects, where development is defined as social change toward a situation where people can exercise their full human potential.
Neoliberalism, Globalization, and Development Neoliberalism is an economic, political, and it can be argued, cultural paradigm, which is all but hegemonic at the governmental scale across the globe. Echoing back to early capitalist thinking, neoliberalism argues that governments fail inherently. Such state intervention in the economy causes crowding out and inefficiency leading the capitalist system to function less effectively, lowering competitiveness, and ultimately prospects for economic development. According to neoliberal thinking the most effective way to optimize welfare is through a privatized, deregulated economy that is open to trade and inward investment. This allows comparative advantage to work on a global scale, thus maximizing total global welfare. Neoliberal policy facilitates the linking of processes at different scales articulating the local into the global and vice versa, thereby stimulating greater economic openness and efficiency. In essence, neoliberalism promotes politicoeconomic Darwinism on a world scale, and the model thrives on the notion that only the fittest economic units survive and that the benefits of efficiency gains will eventually trickle down to all members of society. Neoliberalism is a political ideology, promoting negative liberty (freedom to purse individual goals without intrusion from others), which seeks to optimize welfare through operation of what neoclassical economists called the ‘invisible hand’. In the sense that neoliberalism is bound up as part of capitalistic individualism, it is a cultural paradigm, also. Early neoclassical political economy was clear about the central regulatory function of the state, while neoliberalism is far more mistrusting of its role. The culture of neoliberalism forms part of the wider regulation of the capitalist system and is tied to
Western ideas of modernization, civilization, individualism, materialism, accumulation, and rationality. In terms of its relationship with theoretical perspectives on development it is borne of enlightenment ‘doctrines of development’, which have had a major impact on the Global South since the advent of colonialism and through the neocolonial/postcolonial modernization period since World War II. Neoliberal ideas have fed into recent discourses of good governance, which ostensibly have to do with optimizing the rules and interventions that regulate and govern societies and polities, but arguably have had more to do with the advancement of free-market economics, under the cloak of liberal democracy. There is no reason why good governance should have this particular connotation, some might argue that good governance is best exemplified in the ‘developmental state’. For example, arguably the most impressive developmental progress historically has not come through free markets alone but through state intervention and strategic political economy reflecting popular aspirations. However, neoliberal thinkers link state developmentalism at best to inefficiency and at worst to corruption; thus, arguments for rolling back the state have come to dominate policy reform across the world. Neoliberalism is intimately tied to ‘globalization as currently practiced’, that is to say, corporate globalization. It can be argued that the model that has taken hold since the 1980s is the most recent turn in the globalization agenda which has moved through two waves – colonial and postcolonial – which are further subdivided respectively into two phases, mercantilist and industrial and modernist and neoliberalism, respectively. Neoliberalism reduces barriers to economic flows which opens doors to investment and trade. This leads to the greater penetration of transnational corporations (TNCs) into the Global South and the articulation of peripheral economies into the global capitalist system, often under unfavorable conditions. Globalization has often been used as a synonym for neoliberalism by hyperglobalists who argue there is no alternative. These are really just arguments for a particular model, which is masqueraded as inevitable, that are designed to further the self-interest of those that promote it. As geographers well know, there are many different possible globalizations and the neoliberal model can and is being resisted from the grassroots upward. The reign of neoliberalism and the spell it has cast on orthodox development thinking need not be everlasting.
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Historical Roots of Neoliberalism – Laboratory Chile The ideas of neoliberalism emanate, in large part, from the University of Chicago’s school of economics and are associated with Milton Friedman and other monetarist economists – although the principles have been elaborated beyond supply-side economics. The history of the diffusion of this specific type of economics is in many ways serendipitous, suggesting that the notion that ‘there is no alternative’ is fallacious. Following the Chilean coup of 1973 the military junta led by Augusto Pinochet had no idea of how to run an economy, but they knew that they wanted to reverse the Chilean ‘road to socialism’ of Salvador Allende’s ‘Frente Popular’ which they had toppled. They called on the services of a number of rightwing Chilean economists who had been trained at the University of Chicago during the late 1960s, some of whom had been sponsored by the anticommunistinspired, US-backed funding program ‘Alliance for Progress in the Americas’. They developed a radical restructuring model based on neoliberal principles and received advice directly from Friedman and economists close to him. The Chicago Boys, as they are now known in Chilean folklore (many of them survive till today and one, Joaquin Lavin, came close to being voted president in 1999 and 2005), recommended aggressive opening of the economy, devaluation, sharp reductions in public service expenditure, and privatization of most nationalized industries. In the event the dictatorship did not privatize copper, as this was important strategically and financially to them; Chile has the largest copper supplies in the world, and 10% of revenues were set aside for the military. In a few short years Chile became the most open and ‘free’ economy in the world. This led to an inflow of foreign investment and, later, a surge in exports of primary products and nontraditional agricultural items destined for the Northern Hemisphere. These flows were largely controlled by foreign firms and often mediated through large economic groupings built in part from the elite families established in colonial times. Chile’s macroeconomic ‘miracle’ came at great social, political, and environmental cost, and some have also questioned the economic performance of the model. Given the attendant cuts in social expenditure combined with the shock exposure to global forces, the socioeconomy was radically restructured. Small business, small farmers, the poor, and generally those most in need suffered grave consequences, furthermore, the natural environment was not accounted for in the new model and sustainability was threatened by the clamor to export vast quantities as quickly as possible. In terms of the model’s stated objectives of lowering inflation, increasing exports and competitiveness the policy was a success and it was
argued that eventually this success would trickle down to the masses if the economy were freed up sufficiently to allow this. Based in part on the macroeconomic success of the Chilean model it was applied in the UK in 1979 under Thatcher, to the USA in 1980 under Reagan, and followed by New Zealand in 1984 as the post-World-War-II welfare consensus was eroded by the recessionary impacts of the oil crisis. The diffusion of the policy across the Global South was made possible through structural adjustment policies (SAPs) applied to the periphery by financial institutions, primarily the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank and later some aid donor agencies and the World Trade Organization (WTO). As explored below, the consequences were devastating to the lives of millions of people. It is instructive that in many cases in the 1980s, neoliberalism was brought in under military dictatorships – in democratic systems in poorer countries they may not have been politically sustainable.
Neoliberalism and the Political Economy of Global Development The neoliberal agenda has supporters in many quarters, not least in big transnational business and rightist political parties and organizations that back it. In academia supporters tend to come from schools of business and management in which social issues are not always at the forefront. Proponents of neoliberalism often argue that the success of East Asian countries – breaking away from primary product production and into high-technology manufacturing, services, and ultimately into the top ranks of the global economy – proves that the theory works. Others have countered that the East Asian model has involved market forces and processes, closely monitored, sequenced, and directed by developmental states that have intervened actively to create the conditions necessary for capitalist growth. In a way, there really is no such thing as pure neoliberalism – all economies are regulated to a degree and deregulation can be conceptualized a ‘reregulation’ toward lower levels of state involvement. There is a continuum between structuralist approaches to development and neoliberal approaches, becoming progressively less interventionist as we move toward the latter. At the scale of the whole globe, the world economy remains mixed. Despite the fact that neoliberalism has been promoted as the solution for development ills in the South, Western countries themselves have continued to protect their agriculture and industry behind high tariffs and quota walls, especially in the European Union (EU), Japan, and the USA. In this sense, the world system exhibits neoliberal elements juxtaposed with highly regulated components designed to promote the interests of
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those that have most influence over the rules of the global economy. In this sense the world economy is in fact highly ‘un-free’ for many, especially as it traps much of the Global South into a primary product producing role which offers very few prospects for long-lasting social and economic progress, in spite of fleeting commodity booms such as that which has characterized the late 2000s. The differences in levels of ‘development’ between nation-states and individuals at the extremes is large and growing. Neoliberalism and the networks it creates increase these disparities. The opportunities for those plugged into the net with the abilities to compete are substantial. However, the gaps are becoming wider and more are falling through them. This has the potential to lead to global conflict. There are thus geopolitical and economic, as well as moral arguments for reforming the system. Indeed, post-September 11th 2001, a number of commentators were arguing that the root cause of the conflict was indeed development inequalities. While this vastly oversimplifies the factors behind the current global instability, it does point to the fragility of peaceful relations under the neoliberal model which is so adept, and indeed is predicated on, concentrating wealth.
The Rolling Out of Structural Adjustment Policies and the Rolling Back of the State in the 1980s and 1990s Neoliberalism has risen to global hegemony at a time when alternatives have been sidelined. The end of the Cold War helped solidify the place of the paradigm across the poor world and was seen as a triumph of rational and democratic values. From the mid-1980s onward neoliberalism eclipsed a range of alternative development approaches, including dependency and structuralism. The backbone of this diffusion has been the rolling out of SAPs and World Bank and IMF loans, which together with some aid flows were made conditional on the implementation of neoliberal policy from the mid-1980s onward. Following the reform of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) one of the principal backers of neoliberal reform has been the WTO, which now has the power to punish signatory countries that fail to deregulate and open their economies, even if they are very poor and industrially underdeveloped, lest social and economic intervention ‘distorts’ international trade. The watershed in terms of the implementation of SAPs was the 1982 oil crisis, which led to the debt crisis (which it could be argued still persists). In the 1970s international lending to poorer countries, on the back of petrodollar deposits generated by the first oil hike in 1973, led to an escalation in debt. At the time, given the expansive money supply, interest rates were low.
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Following the second oil hike however, inflation and recession bit into the Western economies and they used supply-side policies, including interest rate rises to restore equilibrium. These rates filtered through the system and left the indebted nations with enormous debt burdens – in Latin America in the 1980s debt outstripped annual GDP in many countries. In 1982 Mexico defaulted and in response a SAP was imposed on the country in return for a rescheduling and extension of debt. SAPs were heralded as the new path toward economic self-sufficiency and modernization, as opposed to the Keynesian-influenced state developmentalism approach that had dominated since the end of World War II. In reality they were designed to restore stability to and expand the profits of the global financial system upon which the prosperity of the elite in the West and their associates in the South was, and remains, dependent. The adoption was rapid across the Global South – after all, countries had little option but to heed the financial institutions that were in turn funded and driven by Western political and economic powers. By 1990, for example, every Latin American and most African countries had adopted neoliberal policies. In this way the World Bank, and its major backers gained neocolonial power over the economy policy of nation-states. By the end of the 1980s a good deal of the Global South had signed up to SAPs, thus surrendering a substantial level of economic sovereignty to external powers with a very particular worldview.
The Nature of Neoliberal Development Models The nature of SAPs has been relatively constant across time and space – leading to accusations of a ‘one size fits all’ approach to their design. Indeed, even former insiders at the World Bank such as former chief economist, Joseph Stiglitz, have argued this point. Essentially, SAPs contained four cornerstones: (1) ‘downsize’ – reduce taxation and public expenditure to lower deficits and raise incentives for private enterprise; (2) ‘privatize’ – sell off state-owned assets to introduce the profit motive into the economy; (3) ‘deregulate’ – reduce state involvement in order to maximize efficiency and allow the free market to find its natural equilibrium; and (4) ‘globalize’ – reduce protectionist measures, such as tariffs, to allow foreign investment, facilitate the transfer of technology, attain economies of scale in exports, and ultimately stimulate competitiveness on the global stage. In isolation, many of the objectives of SAPs are laudable. The unfortunate reality is that economies have often been launched into a global system in which the industrialized economies have had decades and centuries to evolve their economies; thus, it is enormously difficult for poorer countries to
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participate without becoming locked into low-valueadded production as dictated by comparative advantage. In East Asia this comparative advantage was turned into competitive advantage through selective intervention. In most countries, however, adherence to the model has led to little structural economic progress. If the impacts of neoliberalism in the West in the 1980s were harsh, they were devastating in the South. Poverty and inequality were, by definition already much higher in the periphery and the new policies exacerbated these divisions. It is recognized by both supporters and detractors that there are negative impacts when neoliberal policies are first applied. Austerity is required in order to put SAPs in place. Countries adopting SAPs will experience rising inequality, poverty, unemployment, and informal sector activity in the short term at the very least. Neoliberals have consistently argued that these are merely transitory problems of ‘adjustment’. There is gathering consensus, even among some centrist neoliberals, that empirically this has not been observed. The toughest critics have argued that SAPs have often left countries worse off in terms of holistic development measures, including environmental impacts. Studies have shown that it is often women, children, and the poor that have suffered the most devastating consequences in terms of loss of livelihoods and increased vulnerability. Furthermore, these impacts have been shown to be long lasting. The continued marginalization of the developing world in an economic sense can be empirically illustrated as countries in Africa, and parts of Asia, Latin America, and Oceania continue to lag behind. Partly based on the empirically observed failure of SAPs there has been a shift away ostensibly at least from extreme neoliberalism toward what might be termed ‘third way’ policy in some financial institutions and some countries. The case of Latin America, explored below, illustrates the trajectory from extreme SAPs to ‘neoliberalism with a human face’.
Neoliberalism and beyond in Latin America Arguably, in Latin America, the impacts of neoliberalism have been felt more acutely than anywhere else. Given the depth of the debt crisis in the early 1980s, SAPs were almost universally adopted by the middle of the decade. The combination of the austerity measures accompanying the SAPs and the debt burden itself led to a ‘lost decade of development’ whereby previous gains in living standards were halted or reversed. Across the continent income growth fell to 1.4% on average, compared to 5% for the previous decade, becoming negative in places such as Argentina and Bolivia. Unemployment and poverty rose and inflation skyrocketed in many countries. Due in part to
this economic instability dictatorships maintained or grabbed the reigns of power in many places. Based on SAPs, Latin American countries were encouraged to exploit their comparative advantage which was and is almost exclusively found in primary and agricultural production for export. Despite industrialization gains in the largest markets of Brazil and Mexico based largely on the ISI policies of the 1960s, this policy compounded the region’s historical role as a resource periphery for the global economy. This had regressive developmental impacts including declining long-run terms of trade, Dutch disease (overvalued exchange rates), the evolution of enclave economies, and vulnerability to commodity boom and bust cycles among other things. Neoliberal restructuring had a particularly profound effect on agriculture in Latin America. Most of the Latin American economies have relative cost advantages in agriculture and neoliberalism exploits these. There was a major shift away from domestic, food and traditional production in the 1980s and 1990s, toward exportoriented, exotic, and nontraditional production. Forestry, fisheries, and agriculture formed the backbone of this change. This has had profound impacts in rural localities across the continent as the signals of the global market are transmitted into local spaces. Some such trends provided export opportunities for farmers. For many rural dwellers, however, globalization in the countryside has had negative impacts including loss of land, concentration of ownership, increased vulnerability to external trends, and environmental nonsustainability. Following the end of the Cold War and the implicit, and sometimes explicit, support of the US and its allies of the neoliberal, dictatorships of the 1980s declined. This has led to the watering down of the neoliberal agenda in the continent and the revival – to an extent – of regional cooperation efforts. Throughout the 1990s, given that electorates now had the vote, governments had to make concessions to social policy in ways which some have argued hark back to the structuralist period of the 1960s and 1970s. Designed in order to ensure the political sustainability of the model, this has been termed ‘neoliberalism with a human face’ or ‘neostructuralism’. After the Asian Crash of 1997, an economic downturn occurred which led eventually to particularly harsh outcomes in Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay. The left and center-left blamed this on IMF policies and, more broadly, the neoliberal Washington Consensus. Neoliberals blamed internal factors, especially corruption. This crisis solidified the critique of neoliberalism at all levels of society from the grassroots upward and resistance movements became increasingly heard across the continent. The coming together of popular and political concern about the impacts of neoliberalism has led to a shift to ‘center-left’ politics in many countries from the early 2000s, and the victory of presidential candidates with
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centrist and left-leaning tendencies including among others, Lagos (2000–06) and Bachelet (2007–) in Chile, Toledo (2001–06) in Peru, Morales (2006–) in Bolivia, Lula de Silva in Brazil (2003–), Chavez in Venezuela (1999–), Vazquez (2005–) in Uruguay, and Kirchner (2003–08) and Fernandez de Kirchner in Argentina (2008–) among others. It is certain that in order to win elections in Latin America, it is necessary to adopt a post-neoliberal stance, and this is bound up in part with a desire to distance the continent from the currently highly unpopular United States. Ironically, the USA has meddled politically in Latin America less than ever over the last decade and thus the space to distance countries from it has been created. In the Argentinean election of 2007, the eventual winner, the center-left Peronist-influenced Justicialist candidate, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, campaigned using anti-IMF television advertisements which played on nationalistic feelings. Whether the shifts in policy in Latin America can be termed ‘leftist’ or even ‘center-leftist’ has been called into question. There can be little doubt that the policies of Chavez’s Bolivarian revolution, involving nationalization and poverty reduction, fall further to the left than many of the others, but this has been made possible by the country’s ample supply of oil and thus influence over the global economy. Other ostensibly leftist governments such as that of Morales in Bolivia or Ortega (2007–) in Nicaragua could be viewed as populist. In other cases governments are decidedly centrist by historical and global measures, and despite anti-IMF words of leaders such as Kirchner, they are still very accommodating of the global capitalist system. The free market remains a central pillar, and as a consequence the general model in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil is, in fact, further right than the structuralist-inspired policies of the 1960s. Renovated left leaders (los renovados) have argued that global conditions have changed, ISI policies failed, globalization is here to stay, and that the market can be tempered and optimized. Critics might charge that governments across Latin America talk anti-neoliberalism while still pursing many policies that have been inspired by it. Although in a small handful of economies there has been a shift away from primary product export reliance, in most there has not. The resource curse thesis argues that resource endowment can, under certain conditions, actually be an impediment to development progress – in contrast to more traditional neoclassical and neoliberal ideas. This is the most damaging legacy of the years of pure neoliberalism in the continent and one which the current ‘neostructural’ model – whether we define it as a continuance of neoliberalism or something else – is very unlikely to solve. The spectacular yet ultimately nonsustainable short-term windfalls that are accompanying the commodity boom of the mid-2000s may actually delay the necessary strategic diversification of the Latin
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American economies unless the lessons of economic history in this respect are heeded.
The Future of Neoliberalism – Resistance and Reinvention The Global South has been the site of intense struggles over neoliberalism, and resistance movements abound. There is also a rich vein of development theory that has emanated from the periphery – including dependency and structuralism that still has much to say about the current situation despite the disdain that has been piled on it by neoliberal orthodox economists. There have been international institutional attempts at the government scale to resist and reform including, it could be argued, the formation of trade blocs in the South such as Mercado Comun del Sur (MERCOSUR) and South African Development Community (SADC) – although it could be posited that these merely perpetuate and diffuse neoliberalism further. Other examples include the continued policies of Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), collective action by developing countries against the hypocrisy of Western agricultural policy, and more recently, efforts led by Venezuela’s Chavez to build antineoliberal alliance across the Southern Hemisphere incorporating countries that are out of favor in the West such as Iran and Cuba. Whatever one thinks of Chavez’s attempts in this regard they signal a mounting consensus in the South against neoliberal-inspired ideas and the dominance of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. Over the recent past struggles which go back many decades, have coalesced at the grassroots – at least in the eyes of the popular media – to form the antiglobalization movement. To the extent that such a movement can be discerned it is motivated by a common abhorrence to neoliberalism – or ‘globalization as currently practiced’. There has been growing popular dissent and the formation of transnational nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and new social movements intended to resist neoliberalism. This has been particularly prevalent in Latin America, due to the profound impacts of neoliberalism there, its association with rightist dictatorships, and the history of popular struggle. This is embodied most obviously in the Zapatista movement, which some credit as the foundation of the antiglobalization movement. The lines between antiglobalization, anti-neoliberal, anti-Western, and antiUS ‘movements’ have become increasingly hard to discern. Popular struggles have become far broader than opposing neoliberalism, focusing most recently on the Iraq War, as well as more general antipoverty and pro-environment causes. At the root of many such movements there is a disdain for free-market economics and US-led economic and political dominance which, in the opinion of the
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protestors, has brought regressive impacts across most of the world and underlies specific geopolitical moments such as the War on Terror and the so-called fight for democracy in the Middle East. In the case of lending institutions there has been a marginal tinkering with the policies of the Washington Consensus partly in response to the concerns of new social movements and political change. The World Bank’s approach to development is ostensibly far more rounded than it once was, focusing on broader sustainability in a social and environmental sense, drawing attention to poverty and inequality as embodied in the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers, and promoting the notion of good governance. Notwithstanding, the major institutions such as the WTO and the IMF still pursue an essentially neoliberal doctrine of development. It could also be argued that underlying the World Bank’s ostensibly holistic policy is the core idea that it is free markets, free trade, and competition that are deserving of promotion; the road to this might be slightly altered but the eventual destination is the same. Such shifts then have been largely rhetorical, barely hiding the fact that at the core, development finance is about expanding the influence of capitalism across the globe, opening the ‘emerging’ economies as places for business. This might well bring benefits for some sections of society, but ultimately it is tied up with discourses concerning the inevitability of globalization and the need for poorer countries to embrace it or to sink. Do organizations such as ‘Jubilee 2000’, events such as ‘Live 8’, and endeavors by the UK government to write off the debt of the poorest nations point toward a new popular and parliamentary politics when it comes to neoliberalism and development? Will neoliberalism continue to dominate and thus foster corporate globalization or is it being meaningfully reformed? Can we talk of a shift toward a post-neoliberal development policy? The shifts in Latin America and beyond indicate that extreme neoliberalism is no longer popular in the Global South itself, not that it ever was beyond the elites. Indications are that despite promising superficial signs the underlying approach remains much the same. Neoliberalism is both facilitated by and facilitates globalization. It has allowed the penetration of multinational companies who locate parts of the commodity chain in peripheral areas. Neoliberalism has had the effect of widening income gaps at virtually all scales of analysis and the world economy thrives on this unevenness. It may be that the powerful interests that have colluded to make neoliberalism dominant – big business, conservative politics, and the institutions that represent their aspiration such as the WTO – are difficult to defeat. This raises questions over
what we mean by development, and who should be responsible for defining it and designing policy. Development geographers have a duty to continue to map the impacts of neoliberalism, but more crucially they need to engage directly in the formation of viable alternative models if the inequity and nonsustainability of neoliberal development practice is to be challenged. See also: Anti-Geopolitics; Civil Society; Colonialism, Internal; Debt; Dependency; Desertification; Development I; Development II; Famine; HIV/AIDS in Developing Countries; Intermediate Technology; Neoliberalism; Orientalism; Postcolonialism/Postcolonial Geographies.
Further Reading Auty, R. M. (1995). Patterns of Development: Resources, Policy and Economic growth. London: Edward Arnold. Gwynne, R. N. and Kay, C. (2000). Views from the periphery: Future of neoliberalism in Latin America. Third World Quarterly 21(1), 121--156. Gwynne, R. N. and Kay, C. (2004). Latin America Transformed: Globalization and Modernity, (2nd edn.). London: Arnold. Harvey, D. (2007). A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kay, C. (1989). Latin American Theories of Development and Underdevelopment. London: Routledge. Kelsey, J. (1995). The New Zealand Experiment: A World Model for Structural Adjustment? Auckland: Auckland University Press. Murray, W. E. (2004). Neocolonialism. In Forsyth, T. J. (ed.) Encyclopedia of International Development. London: Routledge. Murray, W. E. (2006). Geographies of Globalization. London: Routledge. Peck, J. and Tickell, A. (2002). Neoliberalizing space. Antipode 34, 380--404. Petras, J. F. (1999). The Left Strikes Back: Class Conflict in Latin America in the Age of Neoliberalism. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Potter, R. B., Binns, T., Elliot, J. A. and Smith, D. (2004). Geographies of Development (2nd edn.). Harlow: Prentice-Hall. Power, M. (2003). Rethinking Development Geographies. London: Routledge. Preston, P. W. (1997). Development Theory. Oxford: Blackwell. Smith, N. (1984). Uneven Development. Oxford: Blackwell. Stiglitz, J. E. (2002). Globalization and Its Discontents. London: Penguin Press. Storey, D., Bulloch, H. and Overton, J. D. (2005). The poverty consensus: Some limitations of the popular agenda. Progress in Development Studies 5(1), 30--44.
Relevant Websites http://www.hdr.undp.org Human Development Report, UNDP. http://www.econ.worldbank.org World Development Reports, World Bank.