ABSTRACT
Few people these days could imagine the excitement and enthusiasm when President Harry Truman committed the US to world-wide economic development in his 1950 Point Four speech. There was equal enthusiasm when ten years later President John F. Kennedy proclaimed the Alliance for Progress that was to pull Latin America out of poverty in a decade. President Kennedy's picture still hangs on the walls of peasant huts from Mexico to Patagonia. Economic development – a term that had not even been in common use earlier – became the great exciting ‘discovery’! But as ‘everyone knows’ economic development has not worked. It is seen as a dismal failure.
