Alliance for production: Mexico's incentives for private sector industrial development

The paper examines the tax-credit programme incorporated in the Industrial Plan introduced by the Lopez-Portillo administration (1976–1982). It discusses the objectives of industrial planning in Mexico at that time, and in particular the attempt to use fiscal incentives to guide private sector investment into priority areas. It argues that a priori the effectiveness of the tax-credit programme set out in the plan is questionable as a means of achieving this objective. Data on recent industrial developments in Mexico are examined to see the degree to which they cast light on the question.     

Pakistan's development: An overview

This is the text of two lectures given in the summer of 1980, one at the Institute of Strategic Studies, Islamabad, and the other at the National Defense College, Rawalpindi, Pakistan. The lectures attempted to identify some non-economic determinants of Pakistan's economic performance since the standard economic explanations are not very satisfactory for analysing the country's rather erratic performance over the last three decades. The lectures reviewed Pakistan's economic history from 1947, the time of independence, to 1977, when political power moved once again from a civilian government to a military regime. The lectures underscored the importance of the nature of external economic development, the extent of government commitment to development and the level of participation in economic management as important determinants of economic performance. One of the important conclusions reached was that the governments in the Third World must pay heed to these factors in planning for the difficult times that lie ahead.     

Some aspects of China's agricultural development experience: Implications for developing countries in Asia

China's rather ‘unorthodox’ rural development strategies have attracted growing interest from developing countries in search of more effective development alternatives. The Chinese experiment is characterized by: (1) heavy emphasis on the institutional precondition for agricultural development; (2) rejection of urban-biased policies for more balanced strategies comprising many distinctly pro-agrarian measures; and (3) an integrated approach, centred primarily on the communes, which closely links production to distribution, rural capital formation, rural industrialization, and a wide range of non-farm activities. The Chinese experience should be instructive to many developing countries, even though its direct transfer-ability to different political and social contexts is often called into question.     

The Cross-industry Spillover of Technological Capability: Korea’s DRAM and TFT–LCD Industries

Studies of Korea’s Thin Film Transistor–Liquid Crystal Display (TFT–LCD) industry have emphasized the government policy, industrial organization, and the firm’s strategy as key success factors. However, the fact that knowledge spillover, which tends to occur between highly technologically related industries, can lead to a reduction in innovation effort has been overlooked. We examined the technological relationships between Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) and TFT–LCD industries and investigated their spillover into the areas of technology, human resources and organization, and network. The results show spillover in capital control, technology, production and quality management, organizational systems, and key personnel. This implies that spillover effect in high technology firms may diversify their products due to existing technological capabilities.     

Incentives versus equality: What does China's recent experience show?

Since 1978, China's economic policies have stressed differential rewards for higher productivity, particularly through the contract system in rural areas. This has permitted and encouraged some families to achieve relatively high incomes. However, there was considerable inequality in China before 1978, particularly the persistent and wide disparity between urban and rural incomes. The economic reform has had some tendency to increase slightly the share of income received by the very top group and to reduce slightly the share of the bottom one-third. However, the principal effects have been to raise total income for most residents and to reduce substantially the urban-rural gap.     

India's trade with the socialist countries

India's trade with the socialist countries increased most rapidly after 1960. This rapid growth occured in a framework of bilateral trade agreements, the distinct feature of which was that payments for all transactions were made in rupees. The USSR was by far the most important trading partner. Bilateral rupee trade provided India with imports that were essential for its development programme and was also responsible for a little more than 40 per cent of the growth in India's total exports between 1960/1 and 1972/3. In view of the fact that a large proportion of it constituted a net increase in exports and was probably at better terms of trade, there is no doubt that India derived substantial benefits from its trade with the socialist countries.     

Production versus reproduction: A threat to China's development strategy

The goals of the post-Mao leadership to turn China into a powerful and modern socialist society are jeopardized by the sum total of China's population and projected population growth rates. National development plans are thus based on policies to rapidly promote production and drastically reduce population growth, which at the local level make quite contradictory demands on peasant households. The question underlying China's future development is: can current production plans based on the responsibility system and expanding domestic sidelines which demand that peasant households have access to considerable labour resources be reconciled with State reproduction plants which demand that peasant households have only one child?     

Participation's place in rural development: Seeking clarity through specificity

Over the past few years, development specialists have expressed increasing concern over the lack of progress in altering the plight of the rural poor. Towards this end they are shifting from the capital-investment growth models of the 1960s to the more people-centred basic- needs approaches that are increasingly dominating development thinking in the 1970s. In the process, they are turning to a number of related development strategies, one of the most important and least understood of which is ‘popular participation’. Increasing numbers of studies and activities are being undertaken to bolster government and donor capacity to promote participation in development programmes. Yet, with all these activities the disturbing fact is that there is little agreement on what participation is or on its basic dimensions. This article seeks to provide some order to the emergence of participatory concerns in the development literature, and to offer a carefully elaborated framework that clarifies the notion of ‘rural-development participation’ and make it applicable to total-development projects.