Westernizing the Third World Defining key terms and delineating the scope of the

A Western worldview is the distinctive feature of the mainstream theories of economic development, old and new (Meier ed. 1976, 1984, 1989; Herrick and Kindleberger 1988; Chenery and Srinivasan eds 1988; Gillis et al. 1992). This worldview rests on a utopian presumption of ‘economics as value-free science’ (Heilbroner 1973), rational, analytical and technical (Yutopoulos and Nugent 1976), concerned with ranking investment priorities and choosing amongst alternative allocations of scarce resources to promote economic development. Allocation decisions are then thought to be optimal, ‘objectively’ determined in markets; the ideal market, known in economics textbooks as ‘perfect competition’, rests on rational behaviour and laissez-faire laws of supply and demand going back to the ‘invisible hand’ of Adam Smith (1776), the father of modern economics.