Half of the world's population will live in cities by the early twenty-first century, and, of the ten most populated cities, nine will be in the developing world. Unfortunately, this is occurring at a time when national governments are increasingly unable to provide basic public services to growing populations. International nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) have dramatically increased their efforts in urban areas and in economic and social development in general. Although sociologists have examined the causes and effects of Third World urbanization and development, they have not focused on the role of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in this process. We argue that inclusion of NGOs in the literature is necessary and even compatible with several current theories of development. We test the impact of INGOs on three interrelated measures of urbanization and development: overurbanization, economic growth, and access to safe water. The results show that INGOs slow overurbanization and promote economic and social development.
Dependency‐oriented arguments have not focused sufficient attention on the growing international debt crisis. This omission is unfortunate because foreign debt has introduced several important dynamics into the world capitalist system. Perhaps most important, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has emerged as one of the most powerful transnational financial institutions, as it makes loans to and evaluates credit worthiness of Third World states. To be acceptable credit risks, underdeveloped states often must implement a number of IMF “structural adjustment” or austerity measures. Our cross‐national analysis‐which includes an examination of important outliers‐indicates that IMF‐imposed conditionality is the primary impediment to economic expansion in the Third World. Growing service payments on the external debt also inhibit economic growth, but less so. Moreover, although structural adjustment does not yet significantly impact physical quality of life, foreign investment and level of international reserves do exhibit a negative effect on this indicator. Dependency arguments should be revised and broadened given the profound impact of the global debt crisis.
Previous quantitative cross-national studies of international inequality have skirted several basic questions raised by dependency and world-system theories. These shortcomings stem from data limitations and from difficult problems in design and conceptualization. This paper attempts to overcome some of these problems by: (1) complementing the study of economic development with analyses of cross-national variation in physical quality of life; (2) using data at five points in time (1938, 1950, 1960, 1970, and 1980) and reporting the results of a variety of panel models with different time lags; and (3) implementing a multiple indicator approach to the measurement of economic development, dependency, and physical quality of life. Overall, the analyses show that dependency has a more harmful effect on physical quality of life than on economic development. This holds for a variety of panels and sample definitions. The analysis shows, further, that these effects become stronger with a greater time lag, supporting the long-term historical view of dependency and world-system theories.
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