Instruments of Participatory Enterprise for Grassroots Development

Abstract

Since the advent of the Bretton Woods institutions, the following episodes in the rise of capitalism, the demise of socialism and the rise of the multilateral trade organisation, the world today still faces a grim prospect of 3 billion abject poor (United Nations, 1991), acute disparity between the North and the South and increasingly de-equalizing external deficits for the poor countries. These conditions are found to aggravate the difficulties of the developing countries in addressing their social and economic problems. While the North is today advancing towards a postmodern era of its own, the developing countries and their poor find themselves deeper in the grips of hopelessness. Inequality and deprivation rule the cause and effect of the social and economic relations between nation states and within nations, be these the industrialised or the developing ones.