Towards A Socio-liberal Theory Of World Development (international Political Economy Series)

A study of the determinants of world development from 1960 onwards, using advanced statistical techniques and data from up to 171 countries and territories. Arno Tausch also debates the perspectives for world socialism and for neo-corporatism in the industrialized West. Towards a Socio-Liberal Theory of World Development is a systematic, quantitative study on the determinants of world development from the 1960s onwards, using advanced statistical techniques and data from up to 171 countries and territories. The study confirms the empirical validity of socio-liberal strategies of development, already inherent in the writings of development theorists and the leading thinkers of social democracy in the 1920s and 1930s in Europe, theories that stress the necessity of socio-economic reform in a framework of political democracy and a critique of the mere substitution of private capitalism by state capitalism. Today it is the combination of land and social reform, and capitalist development, which explains the ascent of some countries, most notably in East and Southeast Asia, while other regions of the world economy, like the former communist world in Eastern Europe, are affected by a growing semi-peripheralization. The authors analyze these world-wide perspectives in the framework of long cycles of capitalist development, and also debate the prospects for Eastern Europe and the former USSR and the prospects for reform in the industrialized West in a quantitative structure. Front Matter....Pages i-xvi Introduction....Pages 1-11 World Society Approaches to Development....Pages 12-26 Neo-Dependency Approaches....Pages 27-35 Poland in the Capitalist World Economy — The Limits of Wallerstein’s Approach....Pages 36-46 A Socio-Liberal Alternative?....Pages 47-56 Methods and Data....Pages 57-67 Recent Research, New Results and Discussion....Pages 68-103 A Transition That Never Happened....Pages 104-158 Towards a Pacific Age of Capitalism?....Pages 159-177 Corporatism, Development and the European Model....Pages 178-200 The Future of the Socio-Liberal Model....Pages 201-214 Back Matter....Pages 215-265