The Asiatic Crisis and Models of Sub-Development

Abstract

The re-thinking of the Theories of Development and the analysis of the limited results of the traditional focus on cooperation gave rise to a new approach whose aim was for the developing countries to adjust to the global system and to attain macroeconomical balance by way of implementing plans of economic restructuring. Many are still convinced that only in such an economic context can the process of attracting international and domestic investment be generated that would lead to economic and social progress.The pressure to reduce public spending that has brought on budgetary discipline has, however, led to serious cut backs on social policies and has negatively impacted on the under-privileged sectors of the populations. Today, poverty relief has turned into one of the driving forces for cooperation, unlike years earlier when such relief contained a global-state characteristic and largely failed to evaluate how such relief would affect a societyís different sectors.The high rates of economic growth in the so-called Asian Tigers unleashed great expectations regarding the surging, successful model of Asian development, despite both the flagrant democratic deficit in the regimes that upheld the model and the evidence that social progress lagged far behind economic progress. The monetary and fnancial crisis that whiplashed these countries at the end of 1997 has since led to the questioning of both the solidity of the system and the validity of using, exclusively, macroeconomic statistics as the basic indicators of development. As result of the recent UN summits and conferences, a higher sensitivity towards the interdependencies that globalization imposes on all nations has been reached, and it is to this sensitivity which Cooperation for development must heed in promoting actions aimed at a generalized enjoyment of Human Rights.