Critique of World Bank Report

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“A thirty-year perspective: past and future” is a series of windows into the 30-year period in Sub-Saharan Africa which saw a rapid change in GDP per capita from the early 1970s up until 1987. The document lays down several reasons for the lack of development in these countries, and gives various strategies that could help reform their economic conditions for a brighter future. From my perspective, the article focuses on theories of modernization, and this paper will be contradicting that theory by supporting the dependency theory, critically analysing the reasons for Africa’s poor economic performance in the past, as well as possibilities for the future.

Africa is a land with immense possibilities due to abundance of resources, but unfortunately their “high hopes of rapid development” met a crucial downfall, with fundamental problems in the economic, social and political arenas of the sub-continent. The article by the World Bank brings about evidence that suggests the modernization theory to be the key driving force to enable the weak state institutions to grow by referring to the importance of economic growth and industrialization of the countries in order to develop. “Industrialization was believed to be the engine of economic growth”, and focus on the importance of “transforming traditional economies” show sufficient evidence to prove the advocating of modernization theory in order to achieve development (pg 16, a thirty-year perspective: past and future, 1989).

Modernization theorists consider the primary source of change to be in terms of innovations, and they encourage the underdeveloped world to adopt new ideas, techniques, values that would transcend them from a traditional society to a “more rational” one. Hence the st...

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• World Bank. 1989. “A thirty-year perspective: past and future” In Sub-Saharan Africa: from crisis to sustainable growth (chap. 1)

• POL201 Lecture University of Toronto, 11 October: Dependency, underdevelopment and dependent development.

• http://www.undp.org/africa/ - United Nations Development Program, 2011

• Mukherjee, Aditya. 2010. “Empire: how colonial India made modern Britain.” Economic and Political Weekly XLV, no. 50

• Amin, Samir. 1972. “Underdevelopment and dependence in Black Africa: historical origin.” Journal of Peace Research 9, no. 2

• Valenzuela, J. Samuel and Arturo Valenzuela. 1978. “Modernization and dependency: alternative perspectives in the study of Latin American underdevelopment.” Comparative Politics 10 (4)

• Cardoso, F. H. and E. Faletto, 1979. “Preface to the English edition.” In Dependency and Underdevelopment in Latin America

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