Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
notably Bobek (1974) and Lacoste (1975), was the idea that the internal set of
social relations within a country could often be more significant than any external
dependency relation. By historical analysis, Lacoste believed it could be shown
that internal elites, the controlling social groups within a country, were of great
importance, and that these groups were often in existence before colonialism, so
the colonial structure could not be accused of establishing them. Such groups
held most of the land, the important primary resource, and prevented its better
use by others. They also held the country's capital and were able to exploit the third
factor of production, labour, by controlling wages and jobs. They also controlled
political power and resisted any diminution of this. Any surplus or profits made
in the economy were spent by them on luxury goods and imports, rather than
being reinvested in the country, so checking any developmental initiative. Bobek
identified the existence of a rentier group as the main social feature of many
Asiatic countries, who lived in towns from the rents of land and machinery, or
from loans to peasant workers. This group did not work, but lived from the work
of others, while limiting its freedom. For Lacoste, the difference between
development in British Commonwealth countries such as Canada and Australia,
and countries such as those of Latin America, lies in the presence of elites in the
latter, as opposed to egalitarian immigrant groups in the Commonwealth
countries, moving into effectively empty territories. Bobek and Lacoste's views
are well summarized in English by Reitsma & Kleinpenning (1985).
World systems
A more elaborate spatial model came with the evolution of dependency thinking
into world systems analysis. This latter construct places modern development
into the same light as the economic historians had placed colonial development,
adding new forces of exploitation, notably those employed by the large firm, the
multinational corporation (MNC), rather than the colonial government as with
the historical cases. The MNC methods of control are those of a player in an
elaborate game, using different countries for specific roles in the production
process according to costs: for example, densely peopled poor countries for
assembly operations which use much labour; developed countries with large
pools of skilled labour for component manufacture; metropolitan countries for
research and design and for administration. These companies also exploit
government grants or tax remissions for locating factories, and locate often to
overcome tariff barriers and penetrate otherwise difficult markets. They transfer
products and materials between branches of the company at artificial prices so as
to be able to declare losses in countries with high tax levels, moving production
away from a country as soon as it becomes unprofitable. In world systems analysis,
countries may be described as belonging to the core, semi-periphery, or
periphery (
Fig. 2.2
), according to a set of measures which uses not simply their
level of wealth, but the degree of penetration by foreign firms, types of exports
