Economic development: Fons et origo

Abstract

No doubt believing that the economist should confine his analysis of economic phenomena to the discovery of the most probable economic determinants, a major portion of the literature on economic growth and development does not penetrate to the ultimate level of causation, but remains stuck at the intermediate stage. In doing so it deals, in effect, with the facilitating, alternatively constraining, forces and not with the source and origin of economic development, thus assuming away the quintessence of the problem which afflicts, at least, the Third World countries. Economic development, its initiation if not its maintenance, is a function, not of impersonal economic forces, but of the nature and nurture of human beings and the society which they constitute in collectivity. To discover how a society reaches the stage where economic magnitudes as tools of analysis come into their own, the economist has to borrow from other behavioural sciences. Failure to recognize that there is such a thing as a culture of development has been the cause of the failure of many international economic aid schemes compassionately misconceived in the West.

Notes

Emeritus professor of economics. University of Stellenbosch.