Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
(Friedmann 1988), but as we shall later see, it is a working model for what has
actually happened in East Asia.
Summarizing the right-wing view
For the diffusion of development or right-wing view, the agents of development
are centres, most typically large cities, and from them development impulses
spread out to peripheries. In these cities or centres is accumulated wealth, market
structures, advanced technical know-how and information systems,
entrepreneurship and management skills. They thus become responsible for the
innovations of technology and for their diffusion outwards in a process of
modernization. The industries of these centres offer the high wages that attract
migrant labour, and selectively take the best human resources of the country.
In the long term, however, labour and skills acquire higher value in the
periphery, and are attracted away from the centre to the regions. Capital too,
which was accumulated at the centre in various ways in the initial stages of
development, moves out to other regions because of the higher returns there. It is
also important to note the aims of development under this general view. In so far
as aims were described, development was to raise income or welfare, and
development aid was to reduce the inequality created by the first development. In
the views up to 1980, there was little presentation of the idea that aims might
differ between human groups; nor was there any discussion of the idea that
inequalities might be a healthy characteristic, especially if they induced
movement from declining sectors or regions into more dynamic ones.
Paradoxically, while the unbalancing nature of development was agreed and
development fostered, a kind of ethical consideration led development aids to be
concentrated on dulling the stimuli created by development inequalities.
Finally, there are the policies that result from the theories advanced. Strictly
speaking, a policy of no action on the regional level could be justified, because
interregional differences are seen as dissipating themselves without intervention.
More generally, modest interventions to oil the wheels of industry and commerce
have been seen as desirable, either to improve transport and other infrastructure
(Richardson 1973), or to help the performance of existing private firms and
provide a “level playing field” among a host of firms in open competition for
markets.
Policies for growth poles could be seen as more interventionist, relying as they
did on the insertion of specific industries at specific points in a country and their
building up through the provision of infrastructure. But they still belonged to the
generally positive view of capitalism as benevolent and worthy of expansion out
to other regions from its first centres.
The critique of the whole diffusionist or right-wing development theory is
mostly in the left-wing analyses that follow, which argue that political forces
need to be brought into the equation. To this might be added that a more
fundamental criticism has been the purely spatial character of the analysis,
