The Importance of Context for Theory and Policy Development in Adjusting Economies: The Case of Scotland

Abstract

First paragraph: Within the social and economic development literature modernism can be thought of as the general application of a process of market-driven modernization through expanding commodification, enhanced specialization, coercive competition, and the binding constraint of profitability. It is based upon the experience of developed countries, and is expected to bring economic development to those countries that are not yet developed. This approach can be closely associated with the structural adjustment programmes of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. However, as the modernization process that these two institutions confidently promoted was being implemented in developing countries there was an increasing loss of confidence in government intervention in the developed world. The rise of free market politics and the emergence of a neo-conservative consensus in the 1980s and 1990s in the developed market economies provided an impetus for significant shifts in the ways in which governments intervened in economies.