The question of alternative strategies for economic development is the subject of great controversy and intense debate amongst practitioners and academics concerned with economic and social progress in the Third World. The core of this book is an analysis of the six most widely adopted strategies of development namely monetarism, the open economy, industrialisation, the green revolution or agriculture-led development, redistributive strategies of development and socialist strategies.

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on bloomsburycollections.com. The global economic crisis of 2008-2009 exposed systemic failings at the core of economic policy making worldwide. The crisis came on top of several other crises, including skyrocketing and highly volatile world food and energy prices and climate change. This book argues that new policy approaches are needed to address such devastating global development challenges and to avoid the potentially catastrophic consequences to livelihoods worldwide that would result from present approaches. The contributors to the book are independent development experts, brought together by the UN to identify a development strategy capable of promoting a broad-based economic recovery and at the same time guaranteeing social equity and environmental sustainability both within countries and internationally. This new development approach seeks to promote the reforms needed to improve global governance, providing a more equitable distribution of global public goods. The contributors offer a critical evaluation of past development experiences and report on their creative search for new and well-thought out answers for the future. They suggest that economic progress, fairer societies and environmental sustainability can be compatible objectives, but only when pursued simultaneously by all.

Strategies for the advancement of economic development in the Third World are examined here, with special emphasis on government policies and the implications of alternative policy approaches for the social and material advancement of developing countries.

The World Bank and the IMF dominate policy-making in Africa today. This book considers the consistency between their adjustment policies and long-run development needs, with an analysis of country experience. An alternative development strategy is proposed.