Economics of change in less developed countries / by David Colman and Frederick Nixson

Recent years have seen a flood of books, journals and articles con cerned with the problems of the poor two-thirds of the world's population. Although much attention has been devoted to the analysis of the characteristics and structures of the economies and societies within which the poor live, too often a stereotype of both the people and their societies is presented. While this stereotype has now pro gressed beyond describing the people as 'primitive' or their societies as 'backward', the 'popular' image remains of a basically stagnant, or only slowly changing less-developed world, essentially homogeneous, confronting a small group of rich, developed economies.

In order to simplify analysis of the problems of development it is conventional to classify those countries typified by widespread poverty under one of a number of alternative labels, such as less developed countries (LDCs), underdeveloped countries (UDCs), developing countries, the Third World, satellite, periphery or depen dent economies or simply as poor countries. The dividing line between them and the developed or rich countries is a purely arbitrary one, since as is discussed in Chapter 1 there is no wholly objective criterion of development. But although problems of classification exist, they are not insurmountable and there is general agreement as to which countries should be included in the 'less developed' category. Neverthe less, there is in reality a high degree of diversity of economic, social and political conditions between the countries classed as less-developed or as in the Third World.