macro-environment.
In very broad terms, we can identify three historical phases of political economy and
development thinking in the twentieth century, each associated with a distinct macro-
environment for group behaviour. First, there is the Colonial or neo-colonial period, broadly
occurring from the late nineteenth century to the second world war in Africa and Asia; for
most of Latin America the Colonial period started and ended at a much earlier date, but the
economic aspects of colonialism, associated with the dominance of primary product exports
to serve developed country markets, continued there over roughly the same period as in the
other regions2. The second phase consists of the dominance of a strongly interventionist
statist view of economic policy-making, which broadly occurred over the first three decades
after the second world war, though it started in a mild way in the 1930s in Latin America.
This era coincided with Keynesianism in Western developed countries and the apparent
success of the socialist model in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. The third phase
encompasses the liberal reaction against statist policies, towards monetarism and laisser-
faire which took place from the early 1980s; this was accompanied by a strong opening to the
global economy, or what has been termed ‘globalization’. Chart One reviews the historical
phases.
Although the prevailing development paradigms were developed internationally and were a
common influence on thinking and policy-making, individual countries went through these
phases at different times in accordance with their own political and economic developments.
For example, as noted countries in Latin America acquired political independence much
earlier than other regions, although they adopted broadly similar patterns of development for
much of the time. Some countries adopted the paradigms much more wholeheartedly and
comprehensively than others: for example, Bolivia and Peru appear to have been fully
converted to the laisser-faire paradigm, while many Asian countries maintained more
selectivity, combining elements of ‘opening up’ with elements of protection and state
intervention. Some countries have made almost no moves into the liberalising, globalizing era
(e.g. Laos and Burma). Nonetheless, at an international level the change in paradigms
2 See Thorp. We have termed this the ‘neo-colonial’ period.