Keynesian Policy in Disarticulated Economies

Abstract

The problems of developing countries today are diverse. While poverty and unemployment are experienced widely, the economies in which they occur have different characteristics. A typical sub-Saharan African country experiences the problems of failure to escape from dependence on primary production and the shock of attempting to increase the proportion of tradables (cash crops) in GDP, and its policies revolve around the management of unsustainable levels of official external debt The SICs of Latin America face the problems of combining industrial growth with employment generation, with trade especially linked to the North American markets, and macroeconomic policy conditioned by strong but volatile private capital flows. The rapidly industrialising countries of Asia face problems of growth different from either of these, and different from each other (sharply illustrated by the differences between, say, India and China, which remain the two greatest peasant economies in the process of industrialisation), and the strength of some such as Singapore and South Korea make it doubtful whether they should be regarded as developing, rather than industrialised economies.