WORKING WITH THE GRAIN: INTEGRATING GOVERNANCE AND GROWTH IN DEVELOPMENT STRATEGIES

摘要

Almost all of the country gains in international development gains over the last three or four decades have been in spite of the academic literature that has lacked practical grounding. With some notable exceptions, the literature has been mostly theory, ideology, and abstraction. When not theoretical, it still tends toward single-factor explanation and advocacy with confusing policy prescriptions. Such advocacy ignores country contexts, professional capacities, and their willingness to accept proposed reforms or to accept them and then support implementation. Instead, the development economics and political science literature of the 1960s-1970s focused on such debates as that between modernization policy advocates and those who thought dependence on foreign expertise and capital undermined national development. This led to such policy failures as land reform and import substitution industrialization or even a worse set of populist versions instituted by countries like Venezuela. In the 1980s, the literature shifted focus to righting macroeconomic imbalances and liberalizing markets through such policies as structural adjustment. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the apparent triumph of the Western liberal democratic model led to a set of predictable development policies. The premise was and is that good policies and economies require good governance institutions-rule of law, low corruption, political accountability, clean elections, and capable bureaucracies. Because these were the institutional embodiment of Western enlightenment values, who could disagree?