1) What is the main argument that structuralist authors (radical approaches) pose against classical and neo-classical approaches to ‘development’? To answer this, you may focus on some of the models developed and how they understand underdevelopment (e.g. Rostow, core-periphery, etc.)

The structuralist authors have long argued against the conventional classical and neo-classical approaches to development which emphasis the long existing capitalist structure as the best model for development. Classical theorists tend to equate or see development as economic growth that is achieved though “liberalisation of world trade and comparative advantage.”(Smith and Ricardo). In Rostow's stages of growth model, he explains that a country transition from a state of underdevelopment to development through passing five linear series of stages: the traditional society, the pre-conditions for take-off into pre-conditions for take-off into self-sustaining growth, the take-off, the drive to maturity and the age of high mass consumption. He argued that the advanced countries have already surpassed the stage of take-off into self sustaining growth,” and the underdeveloped countries were still in either the traditional society or the “preconditions” stage because they lack the necessary investment and savings critical for facilitating industrialisation (take-off). The US Marshall aid injected into newly independent states during the post-war period, were supported by this theory. Meanwhile, Friedman in his 1960 core-periphery model, also defined under-development as the early stage where countries have independent local economies with no surplus production, while overtime with 'external disruptions' (colonialism), the independent economies will produce surplus and high productivity and ultimately evolve into a more concentrated - but unequal - system of interdependent core centres (rich cities ) and peripheries (poor rural areas). These inequalities are seen as an inevitable consequence of growth and must be left for the market to correct (Hirshman).They believe, cities will ultimately produce trickle down benefits for the less advantaged and population at large. However, it is this very notion of unequal growth supported in the capitalist structure that is challenged by the structuralists authors. The dependency school viewed 'underdevelopment not as a pristine condition of low productivity and poverty but a historical conditioned of blocked, distorted and dependent development' (Toye,1987,p12). This view is drawn out from the Marxist thinking which criticises this capitalistic structure and attributes the under-development or poverty in the poor countries to a continuous existence of the “class struggles” in the form of a highly unequal interdependence international capitalistic system in which the poor countries of Third world (periphery) are indirectly or directly kept in a dependent position and continues to be dominated by the rich First world (core). Structuralist author Das Santos (19070, 1977) argues that this “basic situation of dependence causes these [poor] countries to be both backward and exploited” instead of receiving trickling down benefits. Supporting the same perspective, Paul Baran (1973) contends that during the colonial period the colonial powers from the First world entered into special partnerships with the elite groups (landlords, entrepreneurs, military rulers, merchants etc) in the less developed and pre-capitalistic countries and then by those means, the economic surplus were extracted and appropriated from the Third to First worlds. In contrast to the linear-stages and classical theories’ that stress on internal constraints such as insufficient savings and investment or lack of education and skills, the proponents of radical approaches see underdevelopment as an externally induced phenomenon that can only be changed by disengaging or freeing the Third world from economic control of developed world or domestic oppressors.