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Economists tend to discount national size in their explanations of development, on the mistaken assumption that all aspects of big and little economies are proportionate. Taking population as the measure of "size," and focusing on the second of the four demographic giants (China, India, USSR, U.S.), the present analysis dwells on the proposition that giantism adds the awkwardness of more layers to official hierarchies. There are two escapes: acceptable decentralization, that is, downward delegation, and "sideways delegation" to such servomechanisms as self-adjusting markets. India not only needs the market for coping with giantism; its size makes its market substantially different—and on balance better—if government can avoid balkanizing its internal economic space. Giantism has, as well, some human-resource dimensions (it may lend the advantage of critical mass to training of skilled elites) and certainly some international aspects (the trade-to-GNP ratios of giant countries, their aid receipts per capita, and their votes per capita in multilateral institutions are all low).

Focuses on the demographic dimension of country size, and its impact on development strategy.

Classic, optimistic, post-World War II development strategy (whereunder the new states, catalyzed by temporary, modest injections of foreign aid, were to achieve accelerated growth, improved mass welfare, and national self-reliance) already was in trouble before it was overtaken by growing awareness of natural-resource scarcities. But, at least in their Limits-of-Growth version, the latter seem to challenge the strategy fundamentally. Six hypotheses for reconciling scarcities and development are: (1) world zero population growth needs urgent promotion; but (2) there is no comparable early need for arresting global economic growth; (3) the poor countries, along with more equity, need faster growth and therefore continuing regularized net transfers from the rich; (4) the rich, while sharing some of their growth dividends with the poor through scarcity-related market adjustments, will keep growing enough also to provide net transfers; (5) the oil crisis is so extreme a case of the problem that it confuses more than it teaches; (6) in a system that is still nation-state dominated, the mixture of cooperative and conflicted scenarios for promoting development in a context of scarcity may veer toward the former as affluent decision makers are "subverted" into planetary perspectives.