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AbstractThis article seeks to introduce scholars outside of development studies to post‐development thought, and to restate its relevance and value to those working within the development field. It begins with an overview of post‐development thought and its critique of the post‐World War Two development project. Following this, specific critiques levelled at post‐development thought and various responses to these are considered. In the last section, the possibility or desirability of raising the living standards of Third World people to a level comparable to those of the First World through economically based development strategies is questioned. The article concludes by drawing attention to First World overdevelopment and the continued value of post‐development thinking in unsettling the development trajectory for either the First or Third World.

Asem,Khalil:none ; This chapter is about the relationship between law and development. More specifically, it is about statutory laws and economic development. The case study will be Palestine after Oslo. Statutory laws are used, in contemporary states or proto-states, as is the case with the Palestinian Authority (hereinafter PA), to effectuate change. This paper shows that statutory laws intend to accelerate the process of socio-economic change, both through deliberate processes of legal reform and through emergency responses to crisis. The objective of achieving development through legal reform, however, does not necessarily hold. On the contrary, as shall be proven by the Palestinian experience since the establishment of the PA, and despite the economic developmental goals present in Oslo strategies and discourses, legal reform in the economic sector was paralleled by continuous deterioration and dependency of the Palestinian economy. Immediately after the signing of the Declaration of Principles, optimism about the future of the Palestinian economy prevailed. This optimism has faded into oblivion. Despite the developmental goals integrally included in the peace process, and the huge amount of money injected directly or indirectly in the PA finance, by the international donor community, the PA economy remained below what have been prior to 1993.

Capital eschews no profit, or very small profit, just as nature was formerly said to abhor a vacuum.With adequate profit, capital is very bold. A certain 10 per cent will ensure its employment anywhere; 20 per cent will produce eagerness; 50 per cent positive audacity; 100 per cent will make it ready to trample on all human laws; 300 per cent and there is not acrime at which it will scruple, nor a risk it will not run, even to the chance of its owner being hanged. If turbulence and strife will bring a profit, it will freely encourage both. Smuggling and the slave trade have amply proved all that is here stated.
T J Dunning, quoted in Karl Marx, Capital I (1976:926, fn.).


This paper explores aspects of the tension between, on the one hand, international efforts by multilateral and bilateral creditors and aid donors to reduce corruption in developing countries and, on the other, the role played by political corruption in promoting local accumulation of wealth, property and capital in Africa. The process of globalisation includes a concerted effort to reduce the costs and increase the predictability of international business activities. The effort has been particularly directed at countries undergoing economic restructuring and democratic change. The weak bargaining position of African states, where debt and underdevelopment make dependence on international creditors and aid donors especially acute, has led to a variety of direct, unsubtle pressures to force these states to undertake 'governance' reforms. While many of these measures address important problems undermining African development, they also misunderstand the nature of corruption as an African problem in two important ways.
First, they seek to impose rules and norms of proper public behaviour, developed for and within liberal democracies, in environments where liberal democracy is not established. And, second, they threaten the dependence of the African petty bourgeoisie on access to the state and its resources. In the context of underdevelopment, local accumulation rests heavily on political power and the ability it provides to appropriate public resources. Corruption provides a means of transferring public resources to the new middle class and bourgeois strata which emerged in the post‐colonial order. And underdevelopment ensures that dependence on political power for accumulation is continuous. Africa's development crisis has intensified dependence on the political domain even more and increased conflict as claimants fight over a diminishing pool of resources. Far from arresting the upward spiral of corruption, liberalisation and governance measures imposed by the donors have encouraged the development of new forms of corruption.

By introducing a new measure of the banking systems' size, the paper challenges the existing consensus on severe underdevelopment of the CEE banking sectors. We argue that the existing studies on the size of CEE banking systems exaggerate the real degree of underdevelopment because common measures of the size of the banking system produce downward biased results when applied to transition economies. We compare various measures of the size of the CEE banking sectors with those of several 'old' European Union (EU) member countries which are used as benchmarks. The comparison indicates that indeed the banking sectors in the CEE countries lag behind the most developed financial systems in the EU, but are very close to the levels in the financially less developed EU countries.