Henry J. Bruton

The search for a development economics

Abstract In this paper, I first note some of the pieces of evidence that suggest that development has gone reasonably well since the early 1950s. Then I discuss why this evidence is not fully convincing and examine the content and sources of Development Failures. The main reason why development is so often accompanied by disappointment and tensions is that it is largely an effort to replicate the West, rather than an effort to set in motion an indigenous process of change within the traditional sectors themselves. The efforts to replace the values and institutions and relationships of the traditional society by imported ones create tensions and uncertainty that can offset the increase in welfare that larger amounts of goods and services could produce. If the present less developed countries do not seek to imitate present GNP-rich countries, what approach is available to them? A country must find its own way, and to do this it must search, it must learn, it must choose, and it must do all these things in a world with GNP-rich countries readily available for imitation. The content of these three notions—Search, Learning, Choice — is examined in some detail in the last part of the article.