The Elusive Quest for Growth

Today the industrialized world as a whole is embarked--half-heartedly, I admit--on yet another crusade to try to make the poorer parts of the world rich. The ideology behind this crusade--an ideology that I believe in--is called "neoliberalism." It has two guiding principles. The first is that close economic contact between the industrial core and the developing periphery is the best way to accelerate the transfer of technology which is the sine qua non for making …

…only. Thus there is a sense in which neoliberalism as we know it is a counsel of despair. Most of what is needed is beyond its reach. The hope is that privatization and world economic integration will in the long run help create the rest of the preconditions for successful development. But we are playing this card not because we think it is a winner, but because it is the last one in our hand.