Towards a Pacific Age of Capitalism?

Abstract

It would be wrong to suggest that Third World industrialization escaped the attention of dependency and world systems theories. Early on, at a Polish-English symposium, which took place in October 1979 at Ojrzanow near Warsaw, G. Palma and M. Bienefeld were among the first writers from that tradition to have spelt out clearly hypotheses concerning the phenomenon. While Palma asserts that the ‘stagnationists’ (A. G. Frank, R. M. Marini, P. Baran) have thus developed schemas that are unable to explain the specificity of political development and political domination in the backward countries and that they ‘have underdeveloped their contribution to the dependency school’ (Palma, 1981: 64), Bienefeld has grasped even more fully what is at stake:

The most prevalent explanation of the NIC phenomenon has placed very heavy emphasis on the internal policies pursued by the respective countries, with special stress on their efforts to get their prices right in relation to international opportunity costs and thereby to promote exports. For the dependency perspective these conclusions represent a considerable challenge in that they assert in a generalized way the prime importance of internal policy, the adequacy of market price signals as guides to resource allocation, and the effective insignificance of the potential problems which might be associated with the role of foreign capital. (Bienefeld, 1981: 88)