Paths to Progress: Bread and Freedom in Developing Societies

An optimistic proposal for the solution to the fierce problems of the Third World nations--by two acknowledged experts.

Drawing on experience in lands as diverse as the Ivory Coast, Singapore, the Punjab, and China's coastal rim, the authors, professors of sociology at City University of New York, explore solutions to poverty and despotism in the Third World.

They show how runaway population, ignorance, corruption, and mismanagement offer opportunities to idealogues of the Islamic renaissance, utopian socialism, or classical capitalism. They then demonstrate a more viable and palatable solution which, in some regions, already has created a high rate of economic growth, literacy, and health, while maintaining an open, stable political system under the rule of law.

Here are concrete examples in Latin America, Southeast Asia, India, and the newly prosperous cities of Asia, where advances in agriculture, imaginative industrialism, investment in human resources, and a resort to dialogue rather than dictatorship have led to escape from poverty without yielding the ideologically rigid tyrannies.

This survey of Third World development focuses specifically on the Ivory Coast, Malaysia, Costa Rica, Colombia, Venezuela, India, China, Hong Kong, and Singapore. No criteria are given for the selection of these locales. While seeming commonalities in the development among several of these places emerge, one can not help but question if other intervening cultural variables are responsible. Libraries interested in having a sweeping perspective on development might consider this title. Academic collections may prefer volumes on the individual countries. Donald Clay Johnson, Coll. of William & Mary Lib., Williamsburg, Va.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.