ABSTRACT
The last part of the twentieth century was a landmark for economic transformation in developing countries around the world. By then, the inward-looking import substitution development strategy, which had prevailed for over a century, showed clear signs of exhaustion, leading economies to stagnation and people to starvation in many countries on different continents. Hence in the early 1970s, developing countries in Asia and Latin America started to drift apart from centralized economies and experimented with market systems to improve growth and welfare.
