Many people are having a new look and some say the trouble is that there is too little aid. They admit that there are many un- healthy and disrupting tendencies but suggest that with more massive aid one ought to be able to over-compensate them. If the available aid cannot be massive enough for everybody, they suggest that it should be concentrated on the countries where the promise of success seems most credible. Not surprisingly, this proposal has failed to win general acceptance.
One of the unhealthy and disruptive tendencies in virtually all the developing countries is the emergence, in an ever more accentuated form, of the 'dual economy', in which there are two different patterns of living as widely separated from each other as two different worlds. It is not a matter of some people being rich and others being poor. both being utilised by a common way of life: it is a matter of two ways of life existing side by side in such a manner that even the humblest member of the one disposes of a daily income which is a high multiple of the income accruing to even the hardest working member of the other. The social and political tensions arising from the dual economy are too obvious to require description.
In the dual economy of a typical developing country, we may find fifteen per cent of the population in the modern sector. mainly confined to one or two big cities. The other eighty-five per cent exists in the rural areas and small towns. For reasons which will be discussed, most of the development effort goes into the big cities, which means that eighty-five per cent of the population are largely by-passed. What is to become of them? Simply to assume that the modern sector in the big cities will grow until it has absorbed almost the entire population -- which is, of course, what has happened in many of the highly developed countries -- is utterly unrealistic. Even the richest countries are groaning under the burden which such a misdistribution of population inevitably imposes.