Appraisal of projects in developing countries: A guide for economists. Overseas Development administration HMSO, Norwich, 1988, 238 pp.
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1002/pad.4230100212 |
| Published date | 01 April 1990 |
| Date | 01 April 1990 |
242
Book
reviews
returned to power after the Cultural Revolution, and have continued since Mao’s death to be
the most rapidly growing sector
of
the Chinese economy. There was a time when it seemed
as
if
few people in the world took Chinese rural industries seriously except Mao Zedong, Fei
Xiaotong, Jon Sigurdson, and Carl Riskin (and the reviewer), and it must gratify Professor
Riskin
to
see that both inside and outside China their key role is now widely recognized, and
they are accepted as being China’s unique contribution to the solution of the problems of
rural development. What is equally obvious is that the acceptance by Mao’s successors of
‘commune and brigade’ enterprise also entailed the acceptance
of
a good deal more
of
Maoism,
for
the attempt to industrialize the village expressed
in
a parallel form three Maoist
tenets: the importance
of
increasing peasant purchasing power without resort to unsustainably
high farm-gate prices; the necessity
of
a large local dimension
of
development; and the role
of the state, beyond the state sector, in initiating, enabling and supervising (rather than
commanding) development at the grass roots. It has taken Deng’s acceptance
of
the market
to make Mao’s hopes a reality, but they remain Mao’s hopes.
Less positive is another continuity: the tendency,
in
spite
of
the most profuse and
emphatic promises to the contrary, for state investment
in
agriculture to revert to the lowest
levels and to become again a residual claim
on
resources to be taken up only when all other
claims have been satisfied.
Yet perhaps the most profound
of
these continuities is one of which the author shows
himself well aware, although
in
the nature
of
the book he was not in a position to elaborate
on it, and that is the persistent and still unchecked arbitrariness
of
Party rule and its
economic consequences. It is not simply that such arbitrariness leads to injustice: it is also
that it has led to the gross and perhaps unnecessary failure
of
past attempts at reform, and
may yet lead to the abortion
of
the reforms now in train. The economic theory
of
the Great
Leap was after all unexceptionable, indeed at that time fashionable: the insistence
on
the
decisive importance
of
agricultural and rural development, the stress on ‘integrated
community development’, the replacement
of
planning for balance by the encouragement
of
dynamic imbalance, the use
of
intermediate technologies, and the employment
of
rural
surplus
labour as a capital resource. All this by
1958
was rapidly becoming the conventional
wisdom, outside
if
not inside the Communist world. What went wrong? Much the same as
had already gone wrong in the collectivization of agriculture and was to go wrong again
in
the Cultural Revolution-the utter inability
of
the population to withstand the’enforcement
of extreme policies, extreme because unmitigated by the need to consult
or
to compromise
with those whose interests were involved. Carl Riskin quotes William Hinton on this:
Anything created by a peasant who lives in the administrative sphere
of
a higher official,
if
it will enhance the latter’s career, can be moved, removed, manipulated,.or expropriated
by that official just as
if
he were the lord
of
a feudal fief.
Time will tell if anything has changed.
JACK
GRAY
Institute
of
Development Studies,
University
of
Sussex
APPRAISAL
OF
PROJECTS IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES: A GUIDE
FOR
ECONOMISTS
Overseas Development Administration
HMSO, Norwich,
1988,
238
pp.
This book is an excellent and welcome addition
to
the literature on project appraisal. It is
aimed specifically at economists but will be
of
use to a wider audience. It is comprehensive,
and handily sized, and should become an essential reference text for operational planners,
consultants and funding agency personnel. It will also be used extensively in project analysis
training.
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