Development as Zombieconomics in the Age of Neoliberalism

Abstract

Development economics is currently dominated by an orthodoxy that is totally intolerant of alternatives and depends upon seeing both economy and society as based upon the incidence of market and institutional imperfections. This is characterised as ‘zombieconomics’ as it feeds in a reductionist and parasitical fashion on more widely cast and methodologically opposed methods, especially those associated traditionally with development studies and the old or classic development economics. This paper explains how this situation came about in the light of the evolution of economics more generally, and explores how development economics has become Americanised, more influential within development studies, policy- rather than critically oriented, and subject to an agenda increasingly set by the World Bank. It concludes by pointing to the challenges and the opportunities open to development studies as neoliberalism experiences a profound crisis to which the new development economics can only offer partial and piecemeal responses.

Notes

This article draws upon, and condenses, many earlier contributions, for reference to which visit https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/view/people/Fine,_Ben.html.

1 B Fine, ‘Zombieconomics: the living death of the dismal science in the age of neo-liberalism’, paper for esrc Neoliberalism Seminar, 1 April 2008, at http://www.cppr.ac.uk/centres/cppr/esrcneoliberalismseminar/.

2 See entry on him by me in D Simon (ed), Fifty Key Thinkers on Development, London: Routledge, 2006, pp 247–252.

3 W Huff, G Dewit and C Oughton, ‘Credibility and reputation building in the developmental state: a model with East Asian applications’, World Development, 29 (4), 2001, p 719; and S Kuznets, Economic Growth of Nations: Total Output and Production Structure, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971.

4 A Krueger, ‘Aid in the development process’, World Bank Research Observer, 1 (1), 1986, p 62, emphasis added.

5 P Krugman, ‘Toward a counter-counterrevolution in development theory’, World Bank Economic Review, Supplement (Proceedings of the Annual Bank Conference on Development Economics), 1992, pp 15–39.

6 See the remarkable M Fujita & P Krugman, ‘The new economic geography: past, present and the future’, Regional Science, 83 (1), 2004, pp 139–164.

7 For example, see J Sachs, The End of Poverty: How We Can Make It Happen in Our Lifetime, London: Penguin, 2005; and, for a critique, T Unwin, ‘No end to poverty’, Journal of Development Studies, 43(5), 2007, pp 929–953.

8 For an account, see B Fine & D Milonakis, From Economics Imperialism to Freakonomics: The Shifting Boundaries between Economics and Other Social Sciences, London: Routledge, 2009.

9 R Bates et al, Analytic Narratives, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998, p 8.

10 Ibid, p 10.

11 Ibid, p 13.

12 E van Waeyenberge, ‘Exploring the emergence of a new aid regime: selectivity, knowledge and the World Bank’, PhD thesis, University of London, 2007.

13 For an interesting personal account, see S Biggs, ‘The lost 1990s? Personal reflections on a history of participatory technology development’, Development in Practice, 18 (4–5), 2008 , pp 489–505.

14 Van Waeyenberge, ‘Exploring the emergence of a new aid regime’.

15 See S Corbridge, ‘ Development as freedom: the spaces of Amartya Sen’, Progress in Development Studies, 2 (3), 2002, pp 183–217, and his entry for Sen in Simon, Fifty Key Thinkers on Development.

16 The concept of the double movement refers to the continuing tension and conflict between the efforts to establish, maintain, and spread the self-regulating market and the efforts to protect people and society from the consequences of the working of the self-regulating market.

17 See K Bayliss & B Fine (eds), Whither the Privatisation Experiment? Electricity and Water Sector Reform in Sub-Saharan Africa, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

18 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josiah_Stamp,_1st_Baron_Stamp for this quote and background information on this remarkable individual.

19 R Biel, The New Imperialism: Crisis and Contradictions in North–South Relations, London: Zed Books, 2000.

20 Ibid, p 190.

21 Ibid, p 191.

22 Ibid, p 12.

23 Ibid, pp 81–82.

24 For an overview of all of this, see T Ashton & C Philpin (eds), The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-industrial Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

25 For a relatively recent critical account covering what follows, with both general overview and reference to a particular sector, see B Fine et al, ‘Beyond Brenner's investment overhang hypothesis: the case of the steel industry, New Political Economy, 10 (1), 2005, pp 43–64.

26 Ibid.

27 See especially D Harvey, The New Imperialism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003; and Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.