Modernization theory maintains which of the following

They needed to adopt Western cultural values and industrialise in order to promote economic growth. In order to do this they would need help from Western governments and companies, in the form of aid and investment. Modernisation theory favoured a capitalist- industrial model of development — they believed that capitalism the free market encouraged efficient production through industrialisation, the process of moving towards factory based production.

Industrial —refers to production taking place in factories rather than in the home or small workshops. This is large scale production. Think car plants and conveyer belts. Capitalism — a system where private money is invested in industry in order to make a profit and goods are produced are for sale in the market place rather than for private consumption. There are alternative systems of production to Capitalism — subsistence systems are where local communities produce what they need and goods produced for sale are kept to a minimum; and Communism, where a central authority decides what should be produced rather than consumer demand and desire for profit.

According to Modernisation Theorists, obstacles to development are internal to poorer countries. In other words, undeveloped countries are undeveloped because they have the wrong cultural and social systems and the wrong values and practices that prevent development from taking place. He was especially critical of the extended kinship and tribal systems found in many traditional societies, which he believed hindered the geographical and social mobility that were essential if a country were to develop as outlined in his Functional Fit theory.

Parsons argued that traditional values in Africa, Asia and Latin America acted as barriers to development which included —. In contrast, Parsons believed that Western cultural values which promoted competition and economic growth: such values included the following:. Modernisation Theorists believed traditional societies needed Western assistance to develop.

Rostow suggested that following initial investment, countries would then set off on an evolutionary process in which they would progress up 5 stages of a development ladder.

This process should take 60 years. The idea is that with help from West, developing countries could develop a lot faster than we did. Stage 1 — Traditional societies whose economies are dominated by subsistence farming. Such societies have little wealth to invest and have limited access to modern industry and technology.

Rostow argued that at this stage there are cultural barriers to development see sheet 6. Stage 2 — The preconditions for take off — the stage in which western aid packages brings western values, practises and expertise into the society. This can take the form of:. Stage 3 — Take off stage — The society experiences economic growth as new modern practices become the norm. Profits are reinvested in infrastructure etc. The country now moves beyond subsistence economy and starts exporting goods to other countries.

This generates more wealth which then trickles down to the population as a whole who are then able to become consumers of new products produced by new industries there and from abroad. More economic growth and investment in education, media and birth control. The population start to realise new opportunities opening up and strive to make the most of their lives.

Stage 5 — The age of high mass consumption. This is where economic growth and production are at Western levels. Contrary to relative poverty, people who live in absolute poverty lack even the basic necessities, which typically include adequate food, clean water, safe housing, and access to health care. Absolute poverty is defined by the World Bank as when someone lives on less than a dollar a day. What would you deem worthy of spending money on, and what could you do without?

How would you manage the necessities—and how would you make up the gap between what you need to live and what you can afford? Subjective poverty describes poverty that is composed of many dimensions; it is subjectively present when your actual income does not meet your expectations and perceptions. With the concept of subjective poverty, the poor themselves have a greater say in recognizing when it is present.

In short, subjective poverty has more to do with how a person or a family defines themselves. This means that a family subsisting on a few dollars a day in Nepal might think of themselves as doing well, within their perception of normal. However, a Westerner travelling to Nepal might visit the same family and see extreme need. What do the driver of an unlicensed speedy cab in St. Catharines, a piecework seamstress working from her home in Mumbai, and a street tortilla vendor in Mexico City have in common?

They are all members of the underground economy , a loosely defined unregulated market unhindered by taxes, government permits, or human protections. Official statistics before the worldwide recession posit that the underground economy accounted for over 50 percent of non-agricultural work in Latin America; the figure went as high as 80 percent in parts of Asia and Africa Chen A recent article in the Wall Street Journal discusses the challenges, parameters, and surprising benefits of this informal marketplace.

The underground economy has never been viewed very positively by global economists. After all, its members do not pay taxes, do not take out loans to grow their businesses, and rarely earn enough to put money back into the economy in the form of consumer spending.

But according to the International Labour Organization an agency of the United Nations , some 52 million people worldwide will lose their jobs due to the recession. And while those in core nations know that unemployment rates and limited government safety nets can be frightening, it is nothing compared to the loss of a job for those barely eking out an existence.

Once that job disappears, the chance of staying afloat is very slim. Within the context of this recession, some see the underground economy as a key player in keeping people alive. Indeed, an economist at the World Bank credits jobs created by the informal economy as a primary reason why peripheral nations are not in worse shape during this recession.

Women in particular benefit from the informal sector. The majority of economically active women in peripheral nations are engaged in the informal sector, which is somewhat buffered from the economic downturn. The flip side, of course, is that it is equally buffered from the possibility of economic growth. Even in Canada, the informal economy exists, although not on the same scale as in peripheral and semi-peripheral nations.

It might include under-the-table nannies, gardeners, and housecleaners, as well as unlicensed street vendors and taxi drivers. There are also those who run informal businesses, like daycares or salons, from their houses. Analysts estimate that this type of of labour may make up 10 to In the end, the article suggests that, whether selling medicinal wines in Thailand or woven bracelets in India, the workers of the underground economy at least have what most people want most of all: a chance to stay afloat Barta Who are the impoverished?

Who is living in absolute poverty? Most of us would guess correctly that the richest countries typically have the fewest people. Compare Canada, which possesses a relatively small slice of the population pie and owns a large slice of the wealth pie, with India.

These disparities have the expected consequence. The poorest people in the world are women in peripheral and semi-peripheral nations. For women, the rate of poverty is particularly exacerbated by the pressure on their time. In general, time is one of the few luxuries the very poor have, but study after study has shown that women in poverty, who are responsible for all family comforts as well as any earnings they can make, have less of it. It is harder for females to get credit to expand businesses, to take the time to learn a new skill, or to spend extra hours improving their craft so as to be able to earn at a higher rate.

The majority of the poorest countries in the world are in Africa. That is not to say there is not diversity within the countries of that continent; countries like South Africa and Egypt have much lower rates of poverty than Angola and Ethiopia, for instance. Overall, African income levels have been dropping relative to the rest of the world, meaning that Africa as a whole is getting relatively poorer.

Exacerbating the problem, saw a drought in northeast Africa that brought starvation to many in the region. Why is Africa in such dire straits? Centuries of struggle over land ownership have meant that much useable land has been ruined or left unfarmed, while many countries with inadequate rainfall have never set up an infrastructure to irrigate. Further, African poverty is worsened by civil wars and inadequate governance that are the result of a continent re-imagined with artificial colonial borders and leaders.

Consider the example of Rwanda. There, two ethnic groups cohabited with their own system of hierarchy and management until Belgians took control of the country in and rigidly confined members of the population into two unequal ethnic groups. This ultimately led to a repressive government and genocide against Tutsis that left hundreds of thousands of Rwandans dead or living in diaspora U. Department of State c.

The painful rebirth of a self-ruled Africa has meant many countries bear ongoing scars as they try to see their way toward the future World Poverty a.

As in Africa, Asia finds itself with disparity in the distribution of poverty, with Japan and South Korea holding much more wealth than India and Cambodia. In fact, most poverty is concentrated in South Asia. One of the most pressing causes of poverty in Asia is simply the pressure that the size of the population puts on its resources. According to the U. Department of State b. However, every part of Asia has felt the global recession, from the poorest countries whose aid packages were hit, to the more industrialized ones whose own industries slowed down.

These factors make the poverty on the ground unlikely to improve any time soon World Poverty b. Poverty rates in some Latin American countries like Mexico have improved recently, in part due to investment in education. But other countries like Paraguay and Peru continue to struggle. Although there is a large amount of foreign investment in this part of the world, it tends to be higher-risk speculative investment rather than the more stable long-term investment Europe often makes in Africa and Asia.

The volatility of these investments means that the region has been unable to leverage them, especially when mixed with high interest rates for aid loans. Further, internal political struggles, illegal drug trafficking, and corrupt governments have added to the pressure World Poverty c.

Argentina is one nation that suffered from increasing debt load in the early s, as the country tried to fight hyperinflation by fixing the peso to the U. By , so much money was leaving the country that there was a financial panic, leading to riots and ultimately, the resignation of the president U.

Department of State a. Most of us do not pay too much attention to where our favourite products are made. And certainly when you are shopping for a cheap T-shirt, you probably do not turn over the label, check who produced the item, and then research whether or not the company has fair labour practices.

In fact it can be very difficult to discover where exactly the items we use everyday have come from. Nevertheless, the purchase of a T-shirt involves us in a series of social relationships that ties us to the lives and working conditions of people around the world. On April 24, , the Rana Plaza building in Dhaka, Bangladesh, collapsed killing 1, garment workers. The workers at Rana Plaza were in fact making clothes for the Joe Fresh label—the signature popular Loblaw brand—when the building collapsed.

But over the last two decades of globalization, Canadian consumers have become increasingly tied through popular retail chains to a complex network of outsourced garment production that stretches from China, through Southeast Asia, to Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. The early s saw the economic opening of China when suddenly millions of workers were available to produce and manufacture consumer items for Westerners at a fraction of the cost of Western production.

Manufacturing that used to take place in Canada moved overseas. Over the ensuing years, the Chinese began to outsource production to regions with even cheaper labour: Vietnam, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh. The outsourcing was outsourced. The result is that when a store like Loblaw places an order, it usually works through agents who in turn source and negotiate the price of materials and production from competing locales around the globe. Most of the T-shirts that we wear in Canada today begin their life in the cotton fields of arid west China, which owe their scale and efficiency to the collectivization projects of centralized state socialism.

However, as the cost of Chinese labour has incrementally increased since the s, the Chinese have moved into the role of connecting Western retailers and designers with production centres elsewhere.

In a global division of labour, if agents organize the sourcing, production chain and logistics, Western retailers can focus their skill and effort on retail marketing. It was in this context that Bangladesh went from having a few dozen garment factories to several thousand.

Unfortunately, although there are legal safety regulations and inspections in Bangladesh, the rapid expansion of the industry has exceeded the ability of underfunded state agencies to enforce them. The globalization of production makes it difficult to follow the links between the purchasing of a T-shirt in a Canadian store and the chain of agents, garment workers, shippers, and agricultural workers whose labour has gone into producing it and getting it to the store.

Our lives are tied to this chain each time we wear a T-shirt, yet the history of its production and the lives it has touched are more or less invisible to us. It becomes even more difficult to do something about the working conditions of those global workers when even the retail stores are uncertain about where the shirts come form. There is no international agency that can enforce compliance with safety or working standards.

Why do you think worker safety standards and factory building inspections have to be imposed by government regulations rather than being simply an integral part of the production process? Why does it seem normal that the issue of worker safety in garment factories is set up in this way?

Why does this make it difficult to resolve or address the issue? The fair trade movement has pushed back against the hyper-exploitation of global workers and forced stores like Loblaw to try to address the unsafe conditions in garment factories like Rana Plaza. Organizations like the Better Factories Cambodia program inspect garment production regularly in Cambodia, enabling stores like Mountain Equipment Co-op to purchase reports on the factory chains it relies on.

After the Rana Plaza disaster, Loblaw signed an Accord of Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh to try to ensure safety compliance of their suppliers. Not surprisingly, the consequences of poverty are often also causes. The poor experience inadequate health care, limited education, and the inaccessibility of birth control. Those born into these conditions are incredibly challenged in their efforts to break out since these consequences of poverty are also causes of poverty, perpetuating a cycle of disadvantage.

According to sociologists Neckerman and Torche in their analysis of global inequality studies, the consequences of poverty are many. They have divided the consequences into three areas. As mentioned above, poverty exists in a cycle where the consequences and causes are intertwined. The second consequence of poverty is its effect on physical and mental health.

Poor people face physical health challenges, including malnutrition and high infant mortality rates. Mental health is also detrimentally affected by the emotional stresses of poverty, with relative deprivation carrying the strongest effect. Again, as with the ongoing inequality, the effects of poverty on mental and physical health become more entrenched as time goes on.

Cross-nationally, crime rates are higher, particularly with violent crime, in countries with higher levels of income inequality Fajnzylber, Lederman, and Loayza While most of us are accustomed to thinking of slavery in terms of pre—Civil War America, modern-day slavery goes hand in hand with global inequality. In short, slavery refers to any time people are sold, treated as property, or forced to work for little or no pay.

Just as in pre—Civil War America, these humans are at the mercy of their employers. Chattel slavery , the form of slavery practised in the pre—Civil War American South, is when one person owns another as property. Child slavery, which may include child prostitution, is a form of chattel slavery.

Debt bondage , or bonded labour, involves the poor pledging themselves as servants in exchange for the cost of basic necessities like transportation, room, and board. In this scenario, people are paid less than they are charged for room and board. When travel is involved, people can arrive in debt for their travel expenses and be unable to work their way free, since their wages do not allow them to ever get ahead.

The global watchdog group Anti-Slavery International recognizes other forms of slavery: human trafficking where people are moved away from their communities and forced to work against their will , child domestic work and child labour, and certain forms of servile marriage, in which women are little more than chattel slaves Anti-Slavery International As with any social issue, global or otherwise, there are a variety of theories that scholars develop to study the topic.

The two most widely applied perspectives on global stratification are modernization theory and dependency theory. According to modernization theory, low-income countries are affected by their lack of industrialization and can improve their global economic standing through:. Critics point out the inherent ethnocentric bias of this theory.

It supposes all countries have the same resources and are capable of following the same path. There is no room within this theory for the possibility that industrialization and technology are not the best goals. There is, of course, some basis for this assumption. Data show that core nations tend to have lower maternal and child mortality rates, longer lifespans, and less absolute poverty. It is also true that in the poorest countries, millions of people die from the lack of clean drinking water and sanitation facilities, which are benefits most of us take for granted.

At the same time, the issue is more complex than the numbers might suggest. Cultural equality, history, community, and local traditions are all at risk as modernization pushes into peripheral countries. The challenge, then, is to allow the benefits of modernization while maintaining a cultural sensitivity to what already exists.

Dependency theory was created in part as a response to the Western-centric mindset of modernization theory. It states that global inequality is primarily caused by core nations or high-income nations exploiting semi-peripheral and peripheral nations or middle-income and low-income nations , creating a cycle of dependence Hendricks In the period of colonialism, core or metropolis nations created the conditions for the underdevelopment of peripheral or hinterland nations through a metropolis-hinterland relationship.

The resources of the hinterlands were shipped to the metropolises where they were converted into manufactured goods and shipped back for consumption in the hinterlands.

The hinterlands were used as the source of cheap resources and were unable to develop competitive manufacturing sectors of their own. Dependency theory states that as long as peripheral nations are dependent on core nations for economic stimulus and access to a larger piece of the global economy, they will never achieve stable and consistent economic growth. By contrast, in Afghanistan, which is also considered an industrializing nation, war and drought has halted economic growth and standards of living have not been rising substantially.

Second, critics claim the term masks the inequality within each country. In other words, saying that India is an industrializing country hides the fact that within India some people are very wealthy and have a high standard of living, while some Indians are very poor and have few resources and opportunities.

Because of such critiques, some scholars use the term less-developed country to describe the present circumstances in countries with relatively small economies and little infrastructure. Developing Countries Need Infrastructure to Facilitate Trade : According to research from the World Bank, one challenge facing industrializing nations is how to successfully export products when they do not have pre-existing infrastructures to facilitiate international trade.

Developed and Developing Countries : This map shows what stage of economic development various countries are in. It also includes which nations are in a transitional moment between stages of development. To be considered a least industrialized country, or least developed country LDC as they are commonly called, a country must have a small economy and low standards of living. Countries in the 1—10, international dollar range roughly correspond to least industrialized countries.

Map of Least Developed Countries : Least developed countries tend to be concentrated in areas with ongoing conflict, a high rate of natural distasters, or industries that are vulnerable to climate instability. Not all LDCs are alike, but many characteristics are shared. LDCs in this region are particularly likely to have authoritarian governments such as dictatorships. In all LDCs, populations have a low standard of living. People living in LDCs are unlikely to have consistent access to electricity, clean water, healthcare, education, and in many cases food and shelter.

Third world countries were undeveloped countries that were neither major players in the capitalist world market nor communist states under the USSR. Least industrialized nations are likely to be exploited by more developed nations for material and human resources, such as oil and cheap labor. They participate in the world economy, but do not greatly benefit from it. Least industrialized nations are at the bottom of a stratified global economic order, and play only a peripheral role in the international economy.

Global Humanitarian Forum Discussion of Special Needs of Least Industrialized Countries : Here policy makers discuss the challenges that countries with small, insecure economies and inadequate infrastructure face as they seek higher status in the global hierarchy. Throughout most of the 20 th century, there was a trend towards divergence between the economies of richer and poorer countries. In other words, the gap between wealthy, developed nations and poorer, developing nations widened — global inequality increased.

Current research indicates, however, that global inequality peaked around Around the year , world income was distributed between extremely rich and extremely poor countries, with little overlap. Thus, there is a broader spectrum of incomes, with fewer people living at the extremes of wealth and poverty than in the past. Since , global inequality has decreased. Global inequality remained persistent but had decreased somewhat.

Even though global inequality has decreased in recent decades, inequality is persistent and shows no signs of disappearing. These statistics are small glimpses of the big picture of global economy, but begin to illustrate the great inequality that exists. Sociologists who study global inequality have proposed social reproduction theory as one way to explain the persistence of inequality.

According to social reproduction theory, rich and powerful individuals and institutions perpetuate inequality to protect their high status. The rich and powerful control the means of production such as factories, land, and transportation and often have strong influence in government. Moreover, they often control the media, schools, and courts, extending their influence in various social realms.

Because individuals and institutions at the top of the economic hierarchy benefit from their status, they use their influence to protect their positions. A related explanation for the persistence of inequality is the idea that culture teaches acceptance of the extant economic hierarchy. According to this view, individuals are taught to believe that the rich and powerful are more talented, hardworking, and intelligent than the poor.

This explanation holds that the misconception that poor people are lazy or irresponsible is widespread, and that people are therefore likely to accept that poor people deserve to be poor. People who ascribe to the cultural belief that the rich are deserving of their wealth are unlikely to challenge economic inequality, so they thereby perpetuate it. Privacy Policy. Skip to main content. Global Stratification and Inequality.