Resource mobilization is the main challenge to achieve sustained growth in poor economies
discuss
At times, it seems as though no other discipline has been subject to so much interpretation in both thought and practice as has what we commonly call 'development'. In large part, this is because the field is founded on concepts which are highly subject to the impregnation by whoever is using them of their own cultural and moral preferences. Further, the relative success that a particular individual or group might have at winning the support of the agents of development--thereby legitimating that particular development doctrine--has to do with their institutionalized position of authority in the world vis-Ã -vis the agents of development and their ability to successfully align the doctrine with the popular sentiment of a particular moment in history. It is for these reasons that development has become so strongly entrenched within the realm of market-based economic philosophy and analysis since the end of the Second World War.
Map of Cold-War era Europe and the Near East showi...
One of a number of posters created by the Economic...
English: Title page of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nati...This has had profound implications for what have become the 'mainstream', or commonly-held, notions of what are perceived to be the crucial goals of development, the ways in which those goals can be attained, and the criteria upon which are based the measurement of successes and failures. It will be useful for the sake of simplification to see this relationship in terms of a recurring tenet of market-oriented economic development policy. To wit, that resource mobilization is the main challenge to achieve sustained growth in poor economies.
The most significant event in the formation of market-based development thought in the immediate post-WWII period was the 1947 signing of the Marshall Plan for the reconstruction of Western Europe. Initially, it emerged in part as a policy outcome of the urgent wishes of a number of Western leaders (largely concentrated...