ABSTRACT
Among early writers on the problems of Less Developed Countries (LDCs) was J.H.Boeke, who proposed a dualistic model of development. Boeke focused his attention on Java, but suggested that ‘the economic problems of Indonesia are typical for a large and important part of the world’ (1953:vi). He theorised that the less developed state of the world’s poorer countries resulted from the conflict between their traditional village economic activities, which he believed to be fatalistic and unresponsive, and Western, materialistic economic thought imposed by the colonial powers which dominated the LDCs of his era. Effectively Boeke’s use of the term dualism encompassed the relationship between what we now commonly term the formal and informal sectors of such countries’ economies.
