Catch-up and Constraints in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries

Abstract

Modern business technology appears to have become far more widely available than in the post-war decades; producers in many developing countries have entered into global or regional value chains as subordinate producers; and developing countries as a bloc have become far more integrated into the world economy than before. ‘Globalization’ theory, derived from neoclassical economics, presumes—with some qualifications—that these trends will yield a more equal world. Yet ‘catch-up’, in the sense of developing countries coming close to or entering the ranks of developed countries, is notable more for its absence in the seven decades since the Second World War than for its presence as a pattern in the world economy. This chapter tackles the question of why.

The World Development Report 2022: Finance for an Equitable Recovery in the Context of the International Debt Crisis

“…The full 267-page document is as bland as the foregoing summary of policy priorities suggests, though it is lifted by some useful statistics. It is a depoliticized technical analysis that steers clear of power and inequality, and especially steers clear of how the geo-economic structure of the worldsystem -and its dominance by a small set of high-income countries led by the US, which have long coordinated amongst themselves to sustain their continued dominance -affects pandemics, financial crises and financial resolutions (Wade, 2019(Wade, , 2020. The remainder of this Assessment focuses on these political economy issues.…”