LECTURERS Dr Tenkir Bonger / Dr Augustine Zvinavashe

I. OBJECTIVES
The course aims to provide a general understanding of the theory,  practice and problems of development in the context of the African and  Zimbabwean experiences.  Particular attention will be focused on  technology, land reform, gender issues, the environment and  industrialization strategies. These will be counterposed in relation to the macro/global interactions of markets, institutions and political  and economic power within and between countries and broader groupings such as the EEC and SADC.  The aim is to create an awareness and  appreciation of the issues in the development debate and relate them to agricultural economic theory and on-going activities.

II. LEARNING METHOD
The course will have two one hour lecture per week spread over 25 teaching weeks in the academic calendar. Topics and issues raised in the lecture will be further explored by learners through short-term papers  (2), individual and group seminar presentations and report of field trips. Theories will be confronted by reports of development practitioners, films and field trips. Students will be encouraged to express views and discuss their experiences and observations related to  the topics being lectured and/or dealt with in seminars. The first part introduces analytical models followed by topical issues and an assessment of their outcome.

Throughout the course the interactions of economic, political and cultural processes will be delineated. The skills and knowledge  acquired in agricultural economics theory and quantitative methods will be utilized to elucidate this applied branch of economics.

III. OUTLINE OF LECTURES

1.      The Meaning and Measurement of Development

•              Underdevelopment, developing/poor countries
•              World Bank's WDR and UNDP's HDR

•               Unemployment and the demographic cycle
•               Rural - Urban Migration
•               The informal sector or a social economy in transition
•               Poverty, Politics, disempowerment and peace/violence.

•              ESAP, Africa, Eastern Europe, EEC and the Americans
•              Population and food, employment, income distribution, environment and their outcomes

•             Classical Neo-classical, structuralist, Marxist, neo    Marxist, Environmentalist, the African specificities

•             Malthusian-population and sluggish technical change
•             Universalization of the Western 'trickle down' experience - Rostow
•             The Classical Economy Pedigree-Smith, Ricardo, Marx, Lewis
•             The Harrod-Domar Growth Models
•             Hirshman/Nurske-balanced versus unbalanced growth models
•             Structuralist Marxist and Neo-Marxist theory and economic development - Baran, Myrdal

•           Evolution of Western European social democracies
•           Expansion of the market frontier - the US experience
•           Centralization, Stratification and Eastern Europe 1917-1990
•           The Chinese model and the Post-Mao Socialism
•           Latifundias and the Latin American Transition
•           The case of Africa - the worst of the two worlds?

•           Role in the development process
•           World Agrarian systems - constraints and opportunities
•           The marketed surplus as an analytical concept
•           Zimbabwean agrarian structure - similarities and departures from other African conditions.

•           Technological change - biological, mechanical, chemical
•           The Green Revolution Technology in Asia, Africa and Zimbabwe
•           Indigenous technological systems
•           Land reform - substance and rhetoric
•           Rural Financial Markets - Constraint of their Mismanagement?
•           Marketing - the legacy of stratification and urban bias

•          The theory of the Big Push
•          Balanced growth
•          Import substitution - the Latin American experience
•          Export-led strategy - East Asia's rise as the power house of the world economy
•          The need for a synthesis between agriculture industry, import substitution and exported growth.

•          Capital theory and its role in the development process
•          Source of capital formation
•          Government as a saver - Fiscal and Monetary Policies
•          Corporate and household savings

•          Foreign resources - banks, official aid, tied/untied, bilateral, multilateral - SAPEM vol 17, No. 1
•          Project vs. program aid and sustainability - Wye document
•          Multinational corporations - imperialists ojres or essential media of access to the international economy

•          women and development
•          population and Poverty
•          demographic and socio-economic change
•          investment in human capita - the brain drain or internationalisation of labour
•          health, education and family planning
•          education and employment

•          neoclassical trade theory and its implications for development
•          trade as a vent for surplus the Bauer and Yamey argument revisited
•          comparative advantage
•          opportunity cost
•          relative factor endowments
•          assumptions and reality

•          trade as engine of growth or mechanism for international inequality
•          composition of LIC trade
•          terms of trade
•          balance of payment
•          the dynamic vs static/path from trading to development

•          tariffs
•          non-tariff barriers- quotas, export subsidies, international carteis, voluntary export
•         restrictions

•         theory of custom unions
•         free trade areas
•         common markets
•         economic unions

•         SADC - the case of South Africa and countries to the North
•         PTA - prospect of merger with SADC
•         CAP - wine lakes and butter mountains
•         EEC OPEC - international cartels?
•         ECOWAS - from trade to regional policing
•         The Lome convention
•         GATT & the Group of 7/G7
•         UNCTAD

•          the pattern of resource flow in the post-war period
•          aid as a mechanism of control
•          the optimum balance between aid and trade
•          bilateral, multilateral & transational aid and/or tightening of belt
•          the emergence of NCiOs - fragmentation or accountability of aid disbursement?
•          moral, polilical, economic and cultural relations between givers, receivers and Lhe elites on both sides

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