Poverty of nations

The book represents the first attempt by a Third World scholar to offer a global perspective of the problems of mass poverty in the South and its solution. Like the Neo-Marxist Dependency Theory (Baran, Frank, Amin), and unlike the Stages of Growth Theory (Rostow) or the Institutional Theory (Myrdal), it attaches great importance to the international economic structure of dominance and dependency between the capitalist DCs and the precapitalist LDCs. But unlike the Dependency Theory, it gives considerable weightage to the political, social and cultural structures of North-South relations, in addition to the economic structure. Secondly, unlike the Stages of Growth Theory or the Institutional Theory, it attaches much greater importance to the class structure and traditional social formations in the LDCs than to the "institutional" factors which are considered to be of only secondary significance. At the same time, the present work gives greater weightage to the social and cultural structures of the LDCs than other structuralist theories. It also makes a special contribution by highlighting the tropical climate as South than any other existing work on the subject.

a long-term natural cause of poverty in the South. Thus it hopefully offers a more global, integral and comprehensive prognosis of mass poverty in the

The book, however, has not been written in the polemical setting of the existing theories of poverty and their limitations. The author has endeavoured to offer an independent empirical analysis of the structural and other causes and dimensions of mass poverty in the first six chapters, leaving a critique of the existing theories as well as the summing up of his own theoretical position for the seventh and last chapter.