Self-reliance in theory and practice in Tanzanian trade relations

Self-reliance is a logical prescription of Latin American dependency writers and a great many other contemporary critics of the international economic and political order. It is based on assumptions and values shared by contemporary critics, employs the same definitions of central concepts, and most important, identifies specific policies designed to eliminate the bases of dependence and exploitation that critics hold responsible for a distortion of the development process throughout much of the Third World. Despite the significance of self-reliance for dependency and other critical writers, it is rarely defined and even less frequently examined systematically. As a result, self-reliance has too often been dismissed as merely part of the ideological jargon that necessarily accompanies discussions of the new international economic order.