there were important differences within the dependency school (see reviews by Palma,1978;
Oman and Wigneraja, Chapter 5). Some believed that the North-South relationship could be
controlled by active policies; some that this was impossible because of the political
consequences of dependency (e.g. Leys, 1975); while some thought that the North-South
connection was ultimately progressive and would lead to eventually to the emergence of a
proletariat and revolution (Warren, 1980). The dependency school did not directly challenge
the P/C norms but argued that power and control should be located in the South, not the
North. The dependency school was dominated by scholars from the South, and the views
were in no way shared by the aid community.
A second reaction was to the rising poverty and unemployment that had become evident in
the 1960s. It was argued that countries had been pursuing the wrong objective: Seers pointed
to the need to 'dethrone GNP'. Candidates for replacing GNP as the main economic objective
were successively employment, redistribution with growth, and the fulfilment of Basic Needs
(BN). This reaction came primarily from the developed countries and the aid-community,
eventually penetrating the World Bank. It was treated with some hostility by developing
country governments. Some of the alternatives advocated involved P/C norms, but differently
directed - for example, basic needs approaches can be highly paternalistic . Others included
some important COOP elements - some of the BN approaches, for example, advocated
participation as an essential basic need (e.g. Streeten and associates,1981; ILO, 1976).
The third strand of thought initiated in the 1970s, to become dominant in the 1980s, was a
reaction to the differential economics performance across countries; 'lessons' were derived
from the rapid and fairly egalitarian growth experienced in East Asia in contrast to the
capital-intensive and élite dominated pattern of growth observed in many places. It was
argued that in the latter countries, the incentive system had been distorted by government
interventions, the role of the government in the economy was too large and that of the market
too small (see e.g. Little, Scitovsky and Scott 1970; Balassa, 1971; Krueger 1974).7 This
7 Deeper analysis of the East Asian experience suggested this was an incorrect
interpretation, and that they too had intervened heavily in the economy, but in a more effieicnt
way (see e.g. Amsden, 1989; Wade, 1990).
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