Masters Theses

Han Gyu Lheem

Date of Award

5-1999

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts

Major

Political Science

Major Professor

Yang Zhong

Committee Members

Lilliard E. Richardson, Jeffery Berejikian

Abstract

Objectives: This research starts with recognizing a problem of uneven economic development. The world economy during the 1980s grew on the average of 3.2 % a year compared with 4.0 % between 1965 to 1980. Specifically, the regional deviations are more serious: Asia (7.3% Vs. 7.8%), Latin America and the Caribbean (1.6% Vs. 6.0%), the Middle East and North Africa (0.5% Vs. 6.7%), and Sub-Saharan Africa (2.1% Vs. 4.2%). All regions except Asia have poorly achieved economic growth and experienced a dramatic decrease of their economic growth rate in the 1980s. Developmental researchers and politicians, accordingly, investigate two questions. These are how students of development politics can explain this uneven economic growth and what factors affect this uneven phenomenon. Being aware of the unevenness, this study discusses three major theoretical approaches to development: the classic-liberal, the neo-Marxist, and the New Comparative Political Economy (NCPE) perspectives and focuses on how they perceive the role of world capitalist economic integration and state capability in development. Furthermore, based on the inconsistencies of existing theories and previous comparative research on economic development, this study tries to construct a critical test of the major hypotheses of the competing theories of economic development and to analyze regional dynamics of economic development during the 1980s. Methods: To test the hypotheses, a cross-national design is implemented. Under Hume's causal criteria (i.e. constant conjunction, contiguity, antecedence, and necessary conjunction), data for 70 LDCs were collected for the overall periods 1965 to 1980 for independent variables and 1980 to 1990 for the dependent variable on a total of 770 country-year combinations. The dependent variable is measured as average annual growth of GDP per capita. Independent variables consist of world system role, economic dependency (including multi-transnational corporate penetration and external debt as % of GNP), economic dependence (including total trade as a % of GNP and aid as a % of GNP), state strength (including internal and external state strength), liberal democracy, and GDP 1965 to 1980. Bivariate zero-order correlations and multiple OLS regression analyses are adopted to test the hypotheses. Findings: The result, overall, addresses that the three competing perspectives to the economic development have various levels of explanatory power, based on regions, even individual countries. However, the result also suggests that neither perspective is adequate by itself. It implies that the dynamic phenomena of economic development in LDCs can only be understood by multidimensional attitudes: for instance, a combination of comparative case studies with cross national and longitudinal research, more serious involvement in refining and measuring variables, a combining framework beyond the fixed paradigmatic approaches, cooperating between structural frames and contingent agents, etc. Finally, this study confirms that only by combining multi-faceted fragments of development, the real dynamics of political economy can be uncovered.

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