Economic growth and social equity in developing countries / by Irma Adelman and Cynthia Taft Morris

This book is a quantitative investigation of the interactions among economic growth, political participation, and the distribution of income in noncommunist developing nations. We apply statistical techniques to qualitative measures of institutional characteristics of nations in order to generate hypotheses about the impact of economic growth and institutional change upon social equity in underdeveloped countries.

Our methodological approach, which does not rely on a narrowly specified theoretical model, provides a way to break out of conven tional circles of thought about the consequences of economic growth for equity and participation. In our view such a break with past thinking is essential in order to overcome the strong tendency for the prevailing views of the discipline to become institution alized-a tendency that occurs less by intention than as a conse quence of the limitations of men's minds.