Definitions and a “new definition”

Framework and analysis

Development – Definition

Gilbert Rist (1938), Honorary Professor at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (Geneva CH)

David Celetti – University of Padua – david.celetti@unipd.it

What’s development?

Essential Bibliography: The History of Development (2003);Le développement. Histoire d’une croyance occidentale (1996); La Mythologie programmée. L’èconomie des croyances dans la Société Moderne (1992);

History

Wealth (1500) Wealth (1900) Wealth (1)

Growth and development Poverty in the USA (Census Bureau 2012)

US GDP growth rate

What is development?

Underweighted children (2002)

Variation in Life Expectancy (1972-2012)

Access to basic health care (2002)

Proportion of worldwide men’s income (2002)

Proportion of all the increase in spending in secondary education (1972-2012)

Proportion of Personal Computer Worldwide (2008)

Development

Economic growth

Social Factors Structural Factors

Social/Political Factors

Inequality among nations (Gini Index)

Inequality among people (Gini Index)

Evidence shows links between economic growth and development

and between development and income distribution?

75 75.5

76 76.5

77 77.5

78 78.5

2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2012

Life expectancy - Cuba

Source: Gavrilova NS / Mortality crisis in Russia (1989-2000) – World Bank 2012 Report

South Commission (1991)

The term development denotes a state or process of increasing welfare, progress, social justice, economic growth, ecological balance, personal development and improvement of any real chance of achieving a life consistent with their expectations and their own ambitions (South Commission Report, 1991)

Human Development Index of the United Nations Development Program is a measure of quality of life. It combines measures of health, wealth and education in a territory.

The Human development is a process of enlarging people's choices. The most critical ones are to lead a long and healthy life, to be educated and to enjoy a decent standard of living. Additional choices include political freedom, guaranteed human rights and self respect - what Adam Smith called the ability to mix with others without being "ashamed to appear in public“.

The World Report on Human Development (1990)

A new definition

A good definition must not be neither vague nor based solely on economic elements or strictly measurable factors.

Rather it must highlight the nature of the process that gave rise to the difference between developed and “under-developed”.

The map shows the proportion of all people living on US$10 purchasing power parity or less.

Territory size shows the proportion of all people living on over PPP US$ 200 a day.

The definition of Gilbert Rist

To meet such requirements it is necessary to identify the mechanisms that determine the process of socio-economic change that in the long period

determined very different degrees of appropriation of the available resource

“Development is a set of practices, sometimes apparently contradictory, that, in order to ensure social reproduction, transform and broadly destroy the natural

environment and the existing social relations, aiming to an ever increasing production of goods and services to be sold, through the exchange, to a solvent

demand”

G. Rist, Le développement. Histoire d’une croyance occidentale, Presses de Sciences Po, Paris, 2001.

Development is a set of practices, sometimes apparently contradictory

Practices – theories, processes, frameworks...- carried out to ensure development are numerous, different, contradictory, sometimes but not

always, consistent with the theories that, often in retrospect, justify them.

1.  Mercantilism and its French variant “Colbertism” 2.  XIXth century liberalism 3.  Imperialism and protectionism 4.  Fascism corporatism 5.  Keynesianism 6.  Socialistic planning 7.  Neo-liberalism 8.  LEC

1.  profit oriented – social oriented 2.  promote or restrict international trade

3.  Increase or decrease the weight and role of the State

Framework and analysis

The focal point of the studies on development should not be the results (good or bad) or the theories, but the processes.

Development is a set of practices, sometimes apparently contradictory

1.  Why specific economic systems set up development processes and with which personal, collective, social results?

2.  What principles (class dominance, ideology, technique,…) governed them? 3.  What happened in other countries/areas at the same time? 4.  Differences and similarities in time, space, classes, cultures? 5.  Capitalism as an ongoing process of increasing the quantity of goods and services

traded on the market in order to enhance the rate of capital accumulation

Territory size shows the proportion of worldwide net exports of clothes (in

US$)

Territory size shows the proportion of worldwide net exports of cars (in

US$) .

Territory size shows the proportion of worldwide

net import of medecines(in US$)

Territory size shows the proportion of worldwide net

import of computers (in US$)

To ensure the social reproduction

Each single path of development in not accidental, but intended to produce and maintain certain advantages within a certain geographical and class

boundary.

Territory size shows the proportion of all people living on PPP US$ 10-20 a day worldwide, that live there

Territory size shows the proportion of all people that rely on US$ 50-100 purchasing power parity a day worldwide, that live there

1.  Attention must be paid to the dominant classes and countries/areas 2.  The benefits are redefined only as a consequence of exceptional events and

crises

To ensure the social reproduction

From the XV century onwards the world was structured into a system a cente-periphery and semi-periphery. Beyond the apparent diversity the world formed a ever more structured and hierarchical pyramid.

I. Wallerstein, The Modern World-System

Direct colonisation (1914).

transform and broadly destroy the natural environment

Territory size shows the proportion of worldwide net forest loss that occurred there between 1990 and 2000.

Territory size shows the proportion of worldwide increases in fuel use (1980-2001) that occurred there.

Economic development is closely integrated with the destruction of the environment, a factor that can determinate the arrest of development itself

Territory size shows the proportion of worldwide fuel imports arriving there.

Territory size shows the proportion of worldwide distribution of water ressources

Territory size shows the proportion of worldwide carbon emission.

Territory size shows the proportion of nuclear waste.

The very existence of the human being has always determined use of resources and energy to ensure its survival and the expansion of the species

However it has long held by equilibrium levels, the only exception being the deforestation trends during the late Middle Ages and the first Modern Age (thermal

energy, plantations based on slave work)

The Industrial Revolution was a turning point. Until the XVIII. cent. the human being was the major drive of the transformation of latent energy into work. The growth of production depended on the growth of population, which in turn was

limited by the growth of agricultural output

The breaking of this pattern was caused by many factors

1.  Reduction of individual production for own consumption and of transactions and distribution of resources based on personal relationship

2.  Enlargement of the market and therefore increase of the production beyond the needs of local manufacturers

3.  Widespread mining of precious metals 4.  Mono-cultural farms based on use of slave labor and on exports of their production

(sugar, cotton, coffee, rubber,...) 5.  Manufacturing system and “scientific agriculture” (from “set aside” models to

chemical fertilizers) 6.  Application of technology and of scientific analysis on all fields of human activity

enhancing productivity though use of “non animated / non-renewable” energy 7.  Widespread use of non-renewable sources of energy and of machines as

fundamental transformer of energy into work 8.  Huge investments and increasing importance of capital vs work 9.  Formal transmission of competences 10. …

Technology

1.  Technology allowed the transition from a “equilibrium” (or static) economy to a dynamic economy

2.  The path of growth is dictated by capabilities of exploitation of mineral resources, i.e. by technology and is characterized by continuous acceleration

3.  Technology is a self promoting mechanism of incremental growth 4.  The production is determined by the available technology (and capital) and not by

demand/needs of the population 5.  The urge of expanding the market (the demand) determined close links between

economic, political and military factors 6.  Technology dominance allowed the expansion of western societies

Internal contradictions

1.  Incremental nature of a process that can not stop/significantly reduce its speed 2.  Resource availability and needs of production 3.  Capital concentration and needs of the population

Coal production

Steam Engines operating in Europe

and the existing social relations

The expansion of the market meant the qualification of all transactions in terms of exchange value determined by supply and solvent demand

The widespread introduction of wage labor determined the systematic replacement of personal relationships (family, tribe, kinship, tradition,... ) with

market relationships

The “realm of the merchandise” expanded to ever newer aspects of human life

The work was transformed into a “merchandize” as “factor of production”

The western culture created an economic and social thought that made of the “principle of economy” the main factor of any human relationship

Expansion of the monetary base during the XIXth century

Children going to a 12 hours night shift (USA 1908)

The process encountered strong – and violent – resistance by the great mass of the people involved

1.  English agricultural revolution 2.  English industrial revolution 3.  French industrialization in the XIX century (revolutions of 1832, 1848, 1870-71) 4.  Italian unification and industrialization (“brigantaggio”, tassa sul macinato, emigration,

first world war, fascism...) 5.  Russian industrialization

E. Sereni, Il capitalismo nelle campagne, Einaudi, Torino 1968 P. Grifone, Il capitale finanziario in Italia, Einaudi, Torino 1971

L. Ganapini, F. Vendramini, Rivolta, violenza e repressione nella storia d’Italia dall’Unità ad oggi, Istituto Storico bellunese della Resistenza e dell’Età Contemporanea, 1995.

E. Delacroix, La libertà guida il popolo, 1830, Parigi, Musée du Louvre

Repression of the protest of the wool workers. Lyon, april 9. 1834

with the aim of increasing production

The development process is defined by and oriented towards the acceleration of production and commercialization.

It is therefore based on a basic hypothesis:

1.  Identity between quantity and quality (increasing amount of goods and services means a better life)

2.  The mankind pursue the purchase of ever increasing quantities of goods as its main goal

3.  The growth is potentially infinite

Internal contradictions

1.  The lack of growth determines crisis and, in the long run, the collapse of the system

2.  Any production determines necessarily a destruction

3.  The process can not be interrupted and has to proceed at an increasing pace

4.  A slowdown in economic growth threatens the social reproduction

5.  Growth is not a choice but a necessity

The “great crisis” of 1929

of goods and services

In many societies the exchange of goods and services was (and is) based on personal relationships (family, community, friendship, hierarchy...).

Such systems were incompatible with the infinite expansion of the market and of the “domain of merchandise”, where exchange has to be “anonymous”

Censer with Seated figure. Maya. 6th Cent. – New York, Metropolitian Museum

Hans Holbein the Jung, Portrait of the merchant Georg Gisze

The application of those principles led to a broad transformation of society and of human relations

1.  The object of exchange became autonomous: the merchandize “travels” through the market following its own rules and without any human “interference”

2.  Development of a conceptual framework based on “scientific economics”: an abstract system that dictates behavior and justifies “a priori” its own results

3.  The distribution of wealth operates independently and with its own rules 4.  Such a mechanism allowed to impose decisions detached from any consideration of

their effects on human beings 5.  This, in turn, differentiated the western cultures from the rest of the world, where

transactions took place mainly on a personal basis

to be sold, through the exchange, to a solvent demand

The exchange is regulated according to the principle of the best individual interest and the assumption that, through the mediation fo the market, the union of individual selfishness determines the maximum common good.

The market functions only if all “players” are solvent. Who’s not solvent – i.e. he has not the funds necessary for operating in the market – is excluded from the system.

Territory size shows the proportion of all extra people to start living in slums between 1990 and 2001, that live in slums in that territory.

But The solvency can not be guaranteed because work as a merchandise may have no

value at all and therefore it might be impossible to convert work into money

1.  Work may lose its value 2.  The conversion of work into money depends from the balance of power of the seller

and of the buyer 3.  An asset can be sold after a long time, can easily be transported, its characteristics

are specific and objectively determined 4.  A human being has immediate needs, limitation of movement and the assessment of

the value of its work is often subjective

Territory size shows the number of international emigrants originating there

A general definition that

1.  Stresses the “fundamentals” of the modern western development 2.  Identifies as “underdeveloped” countries/areas/classes/part of societies in all those

who have not been/are not able to “play” such a scheme 3.  Shows that, so far, the development has to be understood as an extention of the

global market 4.  States that development is a belief, a set of practices, a process 5.  Stresses the contradiction of such a model 6.  Focuses its attention on the evidence that development and non/under development

have a long historical background and have grown as two sides of the same phenomena

7.  Therefore the problem of “underdevelopment” can not be solved apart and independently from the problem of “development”