Chapter 1 Review Questions Answer Key

What is Development?
  1. Those who argue that principles of justice imply a moral obligation to address the needs of the poor not only within national boundaries but beyond these borders largely fall within the philosophical category referred to as cosmopolitanism. According to cosmopolitanism, justice is owed to all people regardless of where they happen to live or where they happen to have been born and regardless of their race or gender, class or citizenship. National boundaries are therefore of little or no moral importance in considerations of justice. Within cosmopolitan thinking, Charles Jones (1999) identifies three main types of justification for global redistributive justice: a consequentialist ethic, a contractarian ethic, and a rights-based ethic. [p. 18]
  2. There are numerous problems with gdp per capita, including that it is an estimate that depends on the quality of information collected by national statistical agencies and that it fails to count the “value” of non-market subsistence activities, which may be quite important in less developed rural areas. GDP tells us relatively little about the extent of poverty—specifically, what proportion of the population is extremely poor—or whether growth is in fact “trickling down” to the poor. It is possible for countries to grow rapidly in GDP per capita but for only the richest segments of society to benefit. In this respect, development cannot be as simple as GDP growth because growth does not necessarily reduce poverty. [p. 9]
  3. Today, anyone who wishes to be involved in international development cannot but experience a great sense of modesty as compared to the kind of intellectual arrogance that was prevalent in the past. Development agencies and practitioners should not assume they can solve local problems from the outside when solutions exist at the local level, which is frequently the case. Above all, development workers need to do more listening and less talking. This growing self-critical attitude among contemporary researchers and practitioners in what we may term the post-naive era of development represents a welcome break from the simplistic interpretations of the past. [p. 21]
  4. The idea that development involved much more than economic growth or an increase in income per capita began to gain ground in the late 1960s, promoted by development theorists and practitioners such as Dudley Seers and Denis Goulet. The arguments of these scholars led to an understanding of poverty and development as multi-dimensional. Seers concluded that six conditions were necessary: adequate income to cover the needs of basic survival; employment (including any non-paid social role that contributes to self-respect and development of the personality); improvement in the distribution of income; an education, particularly literacy; political participation; and national autonomy (belonging to a politically and economically independent nation). Denis Goulet asserted that development should promote the basic requirements for survival (food, clothing, health, and shelter), self-esteem (or dignity and identity of the individual), and freedom (an expanded range of choice and freedom from “servitudes”). [p. 12]
  5. Although inequality is a common feature of most developing countries, it is very difficult to explain why. There are many possible reasons, and at least three explanations seem plausible. First, the impact of colonial rule or neo-colonial economic relations may have forged or consolidated unequal social relations based on slavery, feudalism, and landownership patterns that continue to influence the present. Second, the characteristics of late industrialization—that is, the use of inappropriate capital-intensive technology—reduce the employment potential of GDP growth. Third, inadequate or non-existent social safety nets and regressive taxation systems prevent the redistribution of national income toward the poor and middle classes, as occurred in the developed economies after the Great Depression of the 1930s. The good news is that although income inequality makes development more difficult, it is not impossible to overcome. [p. 11]
  6. Although there are differences between the ethical responsibilities of researchers and those of practitioners, important commonalities between them are required for work in developing countries. An overriding injunction at all times is to “do no harm”—to ensure that the vulnerable are not put at risk as a result of their participation in the research or project. Above all, being ethical as a development worker or researcher suggests a kind of permanent, ongoing self-critique and evaluation of one’s actions and their effects, taking care to identify, privilege, and respect the rights of others over one’s more narrow professional objectives. In other words, development ethics subordinates the goals (what we want to do) to the means of development (how we do it). [p. 20]
  7. It is evident that those closely involved in development were beginning to see growth as an inadequate measure of development and even entertained the possibility that rising incomes, although they improved the ability of individuals to meet basic physical needs, might not contribute to “development” in its more sophisticated and multi-dimensional aspects. These ideas were further developed in the work of Nobel Prize–winning economist Amartya Sen, who argues that development should not be seen simply as rising income levels but rather as an increase in individuals’ substantive freedoms. His approach is called the capability approach. As Sen puts it, the real value of wealth and income is that they are the means for having more freedom to lead the kind of lives of value. In this respect, Sen sees poverty primarily as kinds of “unfreedom,” or deprivation of freedoms, that limit the ability of individuals to improve their lives. Such unfreedoms may include a lack of access to health and welfare services, gender or ethnic discrimination, and limits on basic political, civic, and economic rights. According to Sen, lack of freedom can be the result of either processes (denial of rights normally considered “procedural,” like political, civic, and human rights) or the opportunities that people do not have (inability to feed themselves, receive an education, access health services, avoid premature morbidity). It is worth underlining that these deprivations are absolute, not relative, since all people need a certain level of capabilities in order to function as fully human and live a good human life. [p. 12-3]
  8. Sen’s work has been instrumental (together with that of Seers and Goulet) in opening the door to more multi-dimensional measures of development that go beyond the ubiquitous GDP per capita. In defence of GDP per capita, it is easily measured, and levels of absolute and moderate poverty can be clearly established according to certain income cut-off points. However, is it possible to measure a multi-dimensional concept like Sen’s “development as freedom”? Efforts have been made to construct measures that better capture the multi-dimensional aspects of development. The best known is the Human Development Index (HDI) of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), constructed with input from Amartya Sen. The annual Human Development Report, which ranks the countries of the world by their HDI score, is the UNDP’s flagship publication and was developed in 1990 to promote an alternative and more multi-dimensional measure of development than GDP per capita. Many people see it as an intellectual and philosophical challenge to the World Bank’s annual publication, the World Development Report, which continues to use GNI per capita as a measure of development. The Human Development Index is a composite measure of three equally weighted factors: a long and healthy life, knowledge, and standard of living. A long and healthy life is measured by life expectancy at birth; knowledge is a composite of the adult literacy rate and the combined gross enrolment ratio for primary, secondary, and post-secondary schools; and standard of living is measured by GNI per capita. In this respect, the index recognizes that income levels are important but that other factors also are significant in human development. One may view the education and longevity measures as proxies that take account of the various government services that Seers, Goulet, and Sen see as crucial to expanding the range of individual choice. [pp. 13, 15]
  9. In 2019, the Amazon burned at a rate not seen for decades as farmers sought to clear land for crops and livestock and other fires burned out of control. Many regarded the spike in deforestation as a response to the Brazilian government’s promotion of business interests and economic development in the commodity sector while stripping back social and environmental protections. Rich nations, concerned about the impact on climate change, pledged money to help fight the fires, but Brazil’s president rejected the offer as “colonialist.” In many respects, the fires engulfing the Amazonian region seemed like a metaphor for the impression, in the early decades of the twenty-first century, that the world order was burning down and traditional relationships and understandings that had characterized international development were in flux. At the same time, the climate crisis stormed into global consciousness, and it became evident that the Paris Agreement, signed in 2016, was not going to be sufficient to hold back the worst consequences of anthropogenic climate change. The re-emergence of politically conservative nationalisms around the globe was associated with the denial of environmental concerns, a criminalization and rejection of migration and refugee flows, and a profound questioning of the gains from trade and economic globalization. Emerging economies began to steer their own course and build international institutions to challenge the dominance of the West. And in 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic exploded onto the scene, forcing developing and developed countries to shut down their economies, disrupting the global value chains and personal transportation on which decades of expanding globalization were based and plunging the world into an economic crisis with uncertain long-term consequences for human well-being. [pp. 4-5]
  10. Answer varies depending on which three Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are chosen. The significant part is to make connections between the SDGs and larger issues of development. [p. 17]
  11. The primary principle of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) was “leave no-one behind.” But the SDGs also diverged from the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in three major ways: inequality appeared on the global agenda for the first time; economic and social development was integrated with environmental sustainability; and a global partnership with developing economies was emphasized, especially in the context of newly powerful emerging economies such as China. Indeed, the focus of the SDGs on inequality has been viewed by some as potentially transforming our understanding of development. First, it moves us from the traditional focus on the poorest and their deprivations to a more holistic view of society and its structural challenges. Second, it opens space to consider exclusion in the rich countries and these countries’ role in a world system that can hinder development. Third, by disaggregating the analysis of development by income strata, it makes disadvantaged groups more visible to policy-makers. The SDGs move beyond the targeted-poverty reduction focus of the MDGs to include tackling the root causes of poverty, inequality, and violence, including weak institutions, an unfair global trading regime, and a lack of access to technology. [p. 17]
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