ABSTRACT
Exploitation and dependency are out of fashion among contemporary development economists-for obvious reasons. Structuralist, neo-Marxist and dependencia theorists never managed to construct a coherent framework of analysis that could be used to explain why some less developed countries did better than others (cf. e.g. Hunt 1989: chs 5-7). Group interests, on the other hand, are ‘in’. A great effort has been made to explain the existence of nonoptimal (in traditional welfare terms) policies and institutions, such as tariffs, by theories that are based on the explicit assumptions that conflicts exist between different economic actors, all pursuing their self-interests, and that governments act to balance these group interests in such a way as to maximize the likelihood of remaining in power (cf. e.g. Baldwin 1982, Findlay and Wellisz 1982, 1983, Becker 1983, Frey 1984, Magee et al. 1989).
