Development Dynamics and Globalization

The process of development, in every spatial level (regional, national and local), seems to acquire nowadays a new context and a new evolutionary architecture. The globalization dynamics are restructuring the developmental process as well as the expected results: They constitute the foundational dimension of modern reality and determine the main frame of analysis of the effort to understand the contemporary phenomenon of development. Under these circumstances, the old “ethnocentric perspective” seems to be facing progressively some insuperable interpretive deadlocks. Especially, within the ongoing globalization dynamics all the international, regional and local development dimensions are transcending the narrow ethnocentric view of development and for every of its aspects: whether these are of economic, social, cultural or geostrategic importance. Moreover, a new theoretical reorientation seems to be required in order to understand and interpret the present developmental stagnation of the European South and, especially, to empower its socioeconomic competitiveness. And this reorientation should resynthesizes all the parts of the development dynamics in the ongoing phase of globalization: economic, social, cultural and institutional. Over this course of development, the evolutionary economics and the international political economy perspectives seem to provide a much more fertile context to understand reality, especially when compared to the conventional, neoclassical or Keynesian, theory of international economic relations. More specifically, the future study of institutional dimensions of the developmental process will be at the center of all developmental perspectives.