Paste your essay in here…By nature, humans tend to categorize nearly everything in order to make analysis on a particular subject more orderly and convenient. While these methods are useful, they also tend to come with a set of restrictions, prejudices and cultural overtones since there is an implication within those categorized groups that they are the same, when in reality, they usually are not at all. This issue of classification is especially prevalent when placing a political label on a country based on the level of development in which it has achieved. While there is no quintessential example that the idea of the “developing world” is based off of, what it commonly refers to is a group of countries that perform comparatively and similarly inadequate in economic, social, and political, measures. In the sphere of classifying economic underdevelopment, poverty tends to be one of the most predominant characteristics as it is established by a wide array of contributing factors. Nationally, poverty is broadly classified by low per capita income, unequal income distribution, poor infrastructure, and limited use of modern technology within a developing nation. On a more specified level, economic underdevelopment implies factors such as widespread scarcity, substantial unemployment, poor health conditions, and low literacy/educational levels which in sum all contribute to the level of poverty within a country (Handelman, 3.) Similarly, poverty in less developed countries tends to correlate with poor social circumstances such as high infant mortality rates and low literacy rates, all which ultimately reduce opportunities for human development in other areas (Handelman, 6.) Political underdevelopment is undoubtedly the most difficult aspect to analyze as evaluating political systems in cultural/socioeconomic settings different from one’s own becomes both extremely challenging and controversial. Aside from differing judgments, political development in a nation can be broadly critiqued through the legitimacy of the government and through the levels in which governmental efficiency is achieved by protecting the population’s fundamental freedoms and rights. While these respective issues are viewed as the definitions of underdevelopment, the theories about the cause of these very definitions elicit very different responses due to differing personal backgrounds. Modernization theory, which attributes the developing world’s political unrest and economic struggle to traditional cultural values, is emanated from the developing world while it is also highly critiqued by postcolonial beliefs. This leads to the theory of dependency, which essentially labels Western exploitation as the unavoidable root cause of underdevelopment. Lastly, the theory of neoliberalism explains underdevelopment by recognizing the need for the liberation of "free" enterprise or private enterprise from any bonds imposed by the state, however, critics of the theory emphasize how much social damage the capitalist emphasis on inequality causes.
In the theory of modernization, it is inferred that developing nations should follow a path of political and economic modernization parallel to the one traveled by advanced Western industrialized countries. In order to do so, developing nations were to acquire modern cultural values and create modern political and economic institutions that modeled those executed in the West (Handelman, 19.) Traditional political and economic values were considered somewhat irrational, unscientific, and frozen in there own ways. In order to counteract this, theorists attempted to implement a new way of life in which those citizens of the nation would judge others by universalistic standards, where they could believe in the possibility and the desirability of change, value science and technology, analyze issues outside of the family sphere, and lastly to believe that they could try to influence the political system which governs them. To achieve this, theorists proposed that developing nations needed to create more specialized and complex political and economic institutions to complement these cultural changes. In theory, as these cultural changes and institutional changes progress, a modernizing society can lay the foundation for a more stable, effective, and responsible political system (Handelman, 20.) It is important to note that developmental success in one area of the definition does not automatically imply success within another. In fact, it is actually tremendously difficult to simultaneously achieve development goals, which causes certain goals to be prioritized, however it is not impossible. Modernization does a poor job of explaining underdevelopment since the theory is shown to be far too simplistic and optimistic, as it has no account for external factors that may hinder the developmental process.
Dependency is an inevitable situation in which the economy of a certain group of countries is conditioned by the development and expansion of another economy, to which their own is subjected. Dependency theory challenges modernization theory’s most fundamental assumptions as it rejects the idea that less developed countries can follow the same path to development that the West has because the earliest industrialized nations forever changed the landscape for those that followed them. Countries that become newly industrialized today are to compete against well-established industrial giants that serve as the industrial epitome of what the developing nation is attempting to become. Dependency is a result of attempted modernization as developing nations must turn to highly developed core nations to assist the developmental process, either by borrowing capital or purchasing advanced technology, ultimately making them economically dependent on forces beyond their boundaries and control. Theorists propose that the economic dependency on core nations of the industrialized west also brought about political dependency as political, military, and economic elites backed by other core nations maintained a political system that benefitted the powerful few at the expense of the many. Dependency theory tends to be overly pessimistic about an underdeveloped nation’s chance for development; however, the theory logically explains underdevelopment (for all countries outside of the core nations) because in all instances the less developed nation will always be hindered by a remote higher power whose decisions and influences are out of the nation’s control.
Neoliberalism is often used as shorthand for any idea that is pro-market and anti-government intervention, but above all, it is combining such policies to support the interests of big business, transnational corporations and finance. In terms of development, neoliberalism finds that the newfound goal of globalization, the process enabling financial and investment markets to operate internationally, largely as a result of deregulation and improved communications, was in it itself development (Jeffery.) Rather than ensuring that poor countries would be best served through appropriately targeted policies, neoliberals claimed that since global free markets were both the means and the desired end of development, the only viable object of development was to do whatever necessary to make local markets and societies comply with the new global priorities that the developed countries were bringing into focus. In sum, the local state was to do no more than aid the conditions for a "market society,” all barriers to foreign investment would ideally be removed, the domestic labor force would be "rearranged", industry would be privatized, and the profit motive would become the organizing value of social life. In doing so, the neoliberalist’s main idea of this process of development was that by getting the market conditions correct and then by getting the easily corrupted state out of the way, social justice and human development would follow automatically. The neoliberal theory of development is poorly constructed as it basically prioritizes business over the individual. In this instance, states tend to favor politically powerful and often monopolistic businesses with their targeted credit, grants for research and development, and limitations on market entry. As a result, everyday citizens – those who comprise significantly more of the nation, end up paying the price.
Through the postcolonial perspective, modernization and dependency theory are very contrarily critiqued. Postcolonialism tends to support dependency theory due to the commonly shared mindset that the effects of colonialism tend to be ever-present, even in a decolonized nation, making it nearly impossible for the nation to embark on the same path of modernization as the west. Contrarily, the perspective sees that modernization, as a core concept of development, has directed an unfortunate ripple effect on other dimensions in the Global South rather than fostering the developing world’s growth. Postcolonialism highlights that in modernization theory especially, economically developed and dominant nations habitually set the standards and constitute the model against which others are evaluated and evaluate themselves. This domination of the West over the world in the realms of knowledge, production, and culture (Eurocentrism) is an enduring legacy of colonialism. Modernization theory also enhances an ideology that who is better is who can lead, establishing an even more imbalanced relationship between developed and underdeveloped countries. It is argued that modernization is not only a theory, as it acts also as a measurement of a nation’s developmental level. This is controversial in that it tends to imply that there is nothing beyond the level of development that the West has achieved, however, post colonialism challenges that development should demand “…acknowledgements of a diversity of perspectives and priorities” (McEwan, 95.)
The neoliberal philosophy on development is rightly criticized by feminism as it views state-organized capitalism as a constricted political vision that is so intently focused on class inequality that it can not see such "non-economic" injustices that impact development such as domestic violence, sexual assault and reproductive oppression. By rejecting the economy as the top priority and politicizing a more personal level of development, feminists can argue that the political agenda can be broadened to challenge status hierarchies premised on cultural constructions of gender difference. Feminist critiques of the theory believe that the struggle to transform a status order premised on masculinist cultural values within a developing nation should be weighted equally, if not more than the struggle for economic development.
There is considerable criticism of the use of the term developing country, as the term implies inferiority of a developing country compared to a developed country while simultaneously assuming a desire to develop along the traditional Western model of development. “Developed country” is a peculiar term as it implies that there is nothing beyond the point the nation has reached since they are at the most developed point. Since there is no universal criterion as to what makes a country underdeveloped, the underdeveloped world is classified by a group of countries that insufficiently carry out economic, social, and political measures. The reason behind these respective elements of underdevelopment is explained on a broader scale by the political theories of modernization, dependency, and neoliberalism.