世新大學九十學年度碩士在職專班考試

系所別	考試科目
社會發展研究所	英文

Read the following essay carefully and rewrite it in Chinese, making sure that you capture the author’s central argument and important points.

Understanding Development

John Rapley

The left is dead; long live the left.

In some respects, this phrase captures the present state of the development debate. The terms ”left” and “right” distinguish competing sides of the debate in terms of their attitude to the state’s role in the development process. In the twentieth century, the left—which included not only socialists and communists but also modern liberals-- generally, if not always, favored using the state as an agent of social transformation. The state, it was held, could both develop economies and alter societies in such a way as to make them suit human needs. Underlying this was a belief that the state could embody collective will more effectively than the market, which favored privileged interests. Although the old right, from conservatives through to fascists, also favored strong states and held an equal suspicion of the market, as a political force it declined throughout the post—World War II period. In its place has emerged a new right based on resurgent classical liberalism, which regarded the state as a potential tyrant and venerated the freedom and productive potential of the market.

In the early postwar period, development thought, like conventional economic wisdom, was really neither left nor right. There existed a broad consensus that economies needed more state intervention than they had been given in the past (in fact, in Latin America it was right-wing authoritarian regimes that began employing statist development strategies). Meanwhile, the horrors of the Depression and postwar political developments had given Keynesian economics pride of place in both academic and policy circles in the First World. This influenced Third World academics, whose confidence in the state was further reinforced by the emergence of structuralist economics. Aware of the imperfections in the market and global capitalism, and confident that the state a could overcome them, development theorists proposed models that assigned the state a leading role in the economy. Pretty soon, the left came to espouse these models. Many Third World governments, many of which had just won their independence, eagerly adopted the models, for they seemed to promise a rapid journey into the industrial age.

At first, the models seemed to deliver just that. With the postwar world economy booming, demand for Third World products rose. This provided Third World governments with the capital they needed to develop their industry and infrastructure. However, as time went by , problems in these strategies came to light. It became increasingly clear that many Third World economies were growing more slowly than required to continue improving the standards of living of the world’s poorest citizens. The industrial development that took place consumed more resources than it generated, a waste exacerbated by inefficient states. When the postwar boom came to an end in the 1970s, the shortcomings of state-led development became plain.

It was around this tome that the right began to resurface. Dissident voices belonging to an old school, neoclassical theory, had for decades been firing occasional volleys from the sidelines of development studies. They claimed that the main problem in the Third World was the state itself, and that rapid development could only come about if the state was rolled back. At the same time, as earlier development models became compromised, new left-wing schools of thought emerged to claim that the market itself compromised, new left-wing schools of thought emerged to claim that the market itself was the problem, and that if anything was needed, it was a greater role for the state. The development debate polarized. By the late 1970s the left had become politically weak, its theorists engaged either in internecine squabbles or in strident defenses of orthodoxy. The time was ripe for neoclassical theory to start a revolution. First World electorates and governments, anxious for solutions to the worsening economic situation in their countries, looked to the new ideas and turned to the new right. This initiated a long attack on the state and the other institutions, such as unions, which were seen to be hindering the operation of the market. First World donor agencies began pressuring Third World governments to make similar changes in their policies. Many Third World governments acceded reluctantly, because the debt crisis had weakened their bargaining power with their creditors. Others rolled back the state more eagerly, because local constituencies had already started pushing for reform.

Less state, more market: This was the essential thrust of the strategy, known as structural adjustment, which was soon applied in much of the Third World. The idea seemed sound, but as time would tell, structural adjustment contained its own problems. Its shortcomings, which grew more evident with the passage of time, shed a new and damaging light on neoclassical theory. Structural adjustment yielded some positive gains in the more advanced Third World However, in the poorer countries, those most in need of rapid change, it was less effective and may even have done more harm than good. While out of power, neoclassical writers, like any opposition, could proclaim their theory’s perfect virtue and point to the imperfections of the governing party. Once in power, though, neoclassical theorists had to defend policies that were not working in quite the way public had been led to expect. Meanwhile, its journey through the political wilderness had liberated the left. No longer required to defend sacred truths and orthodoxies—virtually all of them were dead beasts anyway

-- it was free to begin a new debate. Whereas neoclassical theory remains dominant in practice, in the academic realm the pendulum has begun to swing back toward the left—though perhaps not as far as it went in the postwar period, and not even toward the same corner. For if the old left is dead, a new left has arisen to take its place.

And yet, in many parts of the Third World the pendulum may swing neither to the left nor the right; it may not be swinging at all. As we enter the twenty-first century the really troubling questions are not those posed by the left or the right, but those raised by the experiences of people in much, perhaps most, of the Third World who have benefited little from the development debate, and who are unlikely to do so soon. One thing seems clear in much of the Third World today: What works on paper may not work in practice. Neither neoclassical theory, nor the new statist models, may offer much to the world’s poorest countries. We are left to wonder if an entirely new development debate is about to begin.