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whether or not social concerns are important to the country involved. This kind of
thinking might be thought to underlie some of the policies of present-day
Western states, and certainly ties in with the earlier economic development
writing (see the selection of items in Agarwala & Singh 1958).
On the other hand, a leading writer on liberalism in the modern age, Friedrich
Hayek, although he rejected the welfare state, did see a need for some level of
social provision. To Hayek (1986), the creation of the welfare state in Britain
after 1945 constituted a “road to serfdom”, paved with good intentions but
having disastrous results. Anything that distorted market forces created an
artificial environment, making both people and whole nations maladjusted and
thus unable to compete and to earn the income with which to provide their
people with benefits. However, he saw a need to provide a base level of welfare
—some people in some circumstances would need the humane provision of some
services to avoid destitution.
In recent years what might be regarded as a fourth view, or a re-emergence of
older thinking, is that the social structure is of considerable importance, and a
strong differentiating factor between different countries and regions. This
thinking comes from diverse sources. On the one hand, the post-modernists or
post-structuralists (Shuurman 1993, Peet & Watts 1993) see a need to engage
with the diversity of experience in different societies, and to move away from a
standard account of how development happens. Each society has a different
development agenda, and any central power that wishes to impose its own
programme must adjust to that society. On the other hand, Fukuyama (1995)
calls attention to the strength of local social organizations in influencing the
kinds of firms that come into existence and which flourish in particular societies.
In between these, another line of thinking emanating from the Social Market
Foundation is that, apart from pre-existing social structures, it is always of value
to improve the human capital of any society, and that most of what we term
development depends on this high-quality “human capital” once the first stage of
development based on simple unskilled labour is passed.
In this chapter, the position that social provision is an integral part of
development and cannot be set aside will be accepted, on the basis of empirical
evidence rather than theory. Some evidence for that position comes from data
showing that social provision is generally higher among the more economically
developed countries. However, this does not prove any relationship and the
causality might be the opposite way, in that economic development allows and
promotes better social provision. A better case for the active role of social
development is made through seeing the “human capital” of skilled and healthy
workers as a factor in development.
Developed countries
In this section, rather than describe the levels of social attainment generally in
developed countries, we focus on a broad question, that of the relation of policy
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