Towards a Socio-liberal Theory of World Development

This volume is a systematic, quantitative study about the determinants of world development from 1960 onwards, using advanced statistical techniques and data from up to 171 countries and territories. The crisis of world socialism has made it necessary to rethink anew the foundations of development theory. Dependency theories were the answer to the crisis of periphery capitalism in the 1960s and 1970s, and their conclusion was some kind or another of socialism. Later world systems approaches stressed the unity of the capitalist world economy, from whose logic even "socialist" semi-peripheries could not escape. Liberal development theories, by contrast, discovered more recently the negative effects of state sector influence over economic development especially in ageing political systems. There has been a surprising variety of experiences over the last three decades in the world system, however, made all the more dramatic by the revolutions in Eastern Europe of 1989, which cannot be explained completely by any single of the established development theories. The study confirms the validity of socio-liberal strategies of development, which were already inherent in the writings of the leading thinkers of social democracy in the 1920s and 1930s, theories that stress the necessity of socio-economic reform in a framework of political democracy and a critique of the mere substitution of private capitalism by state capitalism. Just as during the last Kondratieff-cycle recession in the 1930s these necessary reforms were realized not only by social democratic movements, but also by authoritarian governments, today it is the combination of land and social reform, and capitalist development which explains the ascent of some countries, most notably in East and Southeast Asia, while other regions of the world economy are affected by a growing semi-peripherization. The authors analyze these world-wide perspectives, and also debate the perspectives for world socialism and for neo-corporatism in the industrialized West. Fred Prager is the co-author of "How Austria Weathered the Economic Storm of the Seventies" (with Lore Scheer).