Publisher's Synopsis
This book provides a long-awaited corrective of contemporary development economics. Reviving the rich intellectual heritage from the mercantilists to the early development economists of the 1940s to 1960s, Kari Polanyi Levitt and Roy Culpeper show how an in-depth re-reading of the great economists of the past answers the profound need for wider perspectives on contemporary development issues.
This groundbreaking work argues that, ultimately, successful development has never been dependent on foreign investment but on mobilisation of domestic resources. A historic understanding of development as modern social and economic transformation, not a macroeconomic structural adjustment, promises a new breadth, depth and vision to theories and practices of global development today. Placing the corporation as the most powerful agent of unequal power relations between North and South in the centre of their analysis, Polanyi Levitt and Culpeper connect economics, ideologies, and historical experience to explain the steep descent and slow return of the Global South in the world economy.
In a time when Western capitalism regresses back to its mercantile origins of commerce and conquest, this book shows that successful development has always reflected the prescriptions of the pioneers of development economics.
