ABSTRACT
One should not exaggerate the rigidity with which each set of policies is linked to each type of story about the role of trade in development. Utilitarian marginalism is a fairly flexible system of thought, and one is not wanting to say that, in principle, it could not be made to reproduce the pessimistic conclusions of dependency theory, by altering a function here and a time-lag there: only that it usually does not. Again, the structuralists and the dependency theorists are sometimes seen embracing each other’s policies; but this must surely be attributable either to opportunism or to confusion, or to the fact that they share, in some cases, common intellectual origins.
