Development

Stuart Corbridge

Development is generally taken to refer to processes of economic and social change that improve the living conditions and choices of people in the Global South. It would be wrong, however, to assume that development is something that occurs only in poor countries or that is directed only at poor people. Development happens everywhere, all the time, and it makes sense to distinguish between three linked but significantly different concepts of development: immanent development, intentional development, and an ideology of developmentalism. Prior to 1800, most of the world's population lived in conditions of extreme income poverty. Leading political economists in Western Europe maintained that working families were trapped in poverty by enduring constraints on agricultural progress. Thomas Malthus, for example, argued that increases in the real wage rates of laborers were quickly reduced by biological pressures to breed. Population growth, he said, took the form of a geometric progression (2, ...

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