IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/palchp/978-1-349-02914-3_6.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Capital Goods in Developing Countries

In: Technology and Underdevelopment

Author

Listed:
  • Frances Stewart

Abstract

The role of heavy industry has been a subject of considerable controversy, both in practice1 — see the Indian and Soviet debates — and in theory. Neo-classical economists distinguish between projects rather than industries. That is to say their methodology tends to assume that no particular merit (or demerit) may be attached to a project because it is in a particular industry — rather each project is to be evaluated for the effects to be attributed to it. In contrast, Marxist tradition has been to make a sharp distinction between capital goods industry (Department I)2 and consumer goods (Department II), and much analysis hangs on this distinction. Developments of this distinction — in particular those of Feldman3 and Mahalanobis respectively — provided the justification for the build-up of heavy industry in Russia in the 1920s and 1930s and in India in the 1950s and 1960s. This chapter is concerned to explore these differences in approach, and to suggest other considerations, particularly technological development, which may justify special treatment for capital goods industries in developing countries.

Suggested Citation

  • Frances Stewart, 1977. "Capital Goods in Developing Countries," Palgrave Macmillan Books, in: Technology and Underdevelopment, chapter 6, pages 141-156, Palgrave Macmillan.
    • Handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-349-02914-3_6
    DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-02914-3_6
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Other versions of this item:

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-349-02914-3_6. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.