Download Free The Socio Political Dimensions Of Economic Planning And Development Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online The Socio Political Dimensions Of Economic Planning And Development and write the review.

This book intends to be helpful to people-students and oth ers-who are beginning to think about how to change the world via that activity we call development planning. The issues of What is Progress? and How do we get it? are world-wide, although they appear in different form in societies like our own from the way they do in the Third World countries with their explicit development planning. These are two very big questions and have no easy or final answers. However, we can think about them in more rather than less effective ways. Thinking about them can be both a way of beginning to take action on issues of growth and change, and a way of understanding our own situation. vii viii I PREFACE This book argues that thinking about development plan ning has gotten into trouble by dividing economy from so ciety, and misconstruing moral-social-political issues as tech nical ones. Development planning has centered on economic planning, treating social issues as obstacles to growth, or as problems arising out of economic change. The book takes up a number of specific topics which enter into development planning-topics such as the organization of work, educa tional planning, family policy-to show how in reality the social and the economic, the moral and the technical, are one, and how thinking about policy in each area should therefore take an integrated perspective.
Perpetual economic growth is physically impossible on a planet with finite resources. Many concerned with humanity's future have focused on the concept of "sustainable development" as an alternative, as they seek means of achieving current economic and social goals without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own goals. Sustainable development brings together elements of economics, public policy, sociology, ecology, resource management, and other related areas, and while the term has become quite popular, it is rarely defined, and even less often is it understood. A Survey of Sustainable Development addresses that problem by bringing together in a single volume the most important works on sustainable human and economic development. It offers a broad overview of the subject, and gives the reader a quick and thorough guide to this highly diffuse topic. The volume offers ten sections on topics including: economic and social dimensions of sustainable development the North/South balance population and the demographic transition agriculture and renewable resources energy and materials use globalization and corporate responsibility local and national strategies Each section is introduced with an essay by one of the volume editors that provides an overview of the subject and a summary of the mainstream literature, followed by two- to three-page abstracts of the most important articles or book chapters on the topic. A Survey of Sustainable Development is the sixth and final volume in the Frontier Issues of Economic Thought series produced by the Global Development And Environment Institute at Tufts University. Each book brings together the most important articles and book chapters in a "frontier" area of economics where important new work is being done but has not yet been incorporated into the mainstream of economic study. The book is an essential reference for students and scholars concerned with economics, environmental studies, public policy and administration, international development, and a broad range of related fields.
First published in 1978, this book was written at a time when belief was high in Western-guided economic development of the emerging countries. The success of Marshall Plan in war-torn Europe generated a US-led optimism that, with generous inflows of aid and technical assistance, the Third World could be won over in the Cold War. The author’s direct experience as a young academic economist in Cyprus, Malaysia, Uganda and Liberia led him to question this general optimism: the reality on the ground in the developing world did not seem to match Western optimism. Theories and blueprints, made in the West, did not fit the requirements of developing countries. Higher production and better income distribution were inseparable twin objectives of developing nations. That meant, production of a higher national output must at the same time promote social justice. Investment must create adequate jobs so that new entrants into rapidly expanding labor force could be gainfully employed. Yet, the dominant (Western) theories of development at the time, in particular the Trickle Down Theory of Growth, prescribed "Growth First, Distribution Later" strategy. Similarly, Import Substitution Industrialization theories were emphasized at the expense of export-led growth. Dualistic Growth theories preached urban-biased, anti-rural development. This book was written as a rebuttal of such faulty theorizing and misguided professional technical assistance and the book’s message is no less valid today than in the 1970’s.
Democratic Economic Planning presents a concrete proposal for how to organize, carry out, and integrate comprehensive annual economic planning, investment planning, and long-run development planning so as to maximize popular participation, distribute the burdens and benefits of economic activity fairly, achieve environmental sustainability, and use scarce productive resources efficiently. The participatory planning procedures proposed provide workers in self-managed councils and consumers in neighbourhood councils with autonomy over their own activities while ensuring that they use scarce productive resources in socially responsible ways without subjecting them to competitive market forces. Certain mathematical and economic skills are required to fully understand and evaluate the planning procedures discussed and evaluated in technical sections in a number of chapters. These sections are necessary to advance the theory of democratic planning, and should be of primary interest to readers who have those skills. However, the book is written so that the main argument can be followed without fully digesting the more technical sections. Democratic Economic Planning is written for dreamers who are disenamored with the economics of competition and greed want to know how a system of equitable cooperation can be organized; and also for sceptics who demand "hard proof" that an economy without markets and private enterprise is possible.
While probing into the economics of development and planning and evolving the strategy for social transformation, professional economists often lose sight of the ultimate goalman. The firsthand knowledge and experience of the human situation are tabulated and computerised, and then they reappear as abstract ‘models’ and formal ‘indicators’. In his Social Development and Planning in Asia Dr. Ralph Pieris salvages this human factor that often tends to disappear behind ‘significant statistics’. Unlike the alienated technocrats, whose profession is to devise strategies for economic development, Dr. Pieris stresses the human dimension of all socio-economic planning. The papers included in this volume were prepared during 1951-75; they trace not only the history of the socio-economic development in the underdeveloped Asian countries, but also delineate the dialectical relationship between the philosophy of development and the ‘social-man’. This vein of concern for the human situation, though running through all his writings, is methodically formulated in Part IV of the book — “The Problem of Human Relationships: A Grammer of Sociology”. In whatever he has written during the past quarter century, Dr. Ralph Pieris is rightfully confident that he has pre-empted Gunnar Mydal’s Prognosis (1970).