Introduction

Abstract

Though social scientists are usually reticent about making value judgements, probably few would hesitate to say that the problem of development of the less-developed countries (LDCs) is the most pressing problem of our time. However, the common awareness has failed to produce anything like an unité de doctrine in the theoretical realm. This is hardly surprising. The problem of alleviating the poverty of the major part of mankind clearly is not an easy one. It took 200 years to overcome the poverty of a relatively small part of mankind, and there will be no ready solutions for accomplishing the rest of the task.