The Persistence of Underdevelopment

Abstract

It is easy to argue that poverty and backwardness are due to a general shortage and inefficient use of the key factors of production; it is much harder to determine precisely why there should be a dearth of some factors and an abundance of others, and why development may be a slow and lengthy process. It is certainly impossible to explain present-day international discrepancies in the level of development with reference to initial differences in factor endowments. The present development gap has arisen largely through industrial development in certain selected areas of the world which has, in turn, generated its own factor endowments. The purpose here, however, is not to consider why some countries were able to industrialise sooner than others, but rather to consider some of the potential obstacles to growth in the present less developed countries, from which the developed countries do not suffer.