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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:Premiss and inference in labour studies: a Zambian example
Author:Perrings, Charles
Year:1982
Periodical:African Affairs: The Journal of the Royal African Society
Volume:81
Issue:322
Pages:87-99
Language:English
Geographic term:Zambia
Subjects:wages
employment
nationalization
copper mining
External link:https://www.jstor.org/stable/721506
Abstract:Economists focussing on the specific problems of the underdeveloped countries were disillusioned with the models handed down by their mentors, and had taken refuge in a pragmatic empiricist approach in which intuition supplanted explicit formal theory. In Africa and elsewhere the data required to feed the planners' programmes had proved either unavailable or worse than useless; the programmes themselves had turned out to be inadequate; stock behavioural assumptions were irrelevant; the ideology of the Keynesian state which made sense of the convential policy prescriptions was nowhere to be found. Many development economists saw their first responsibility as the construction of a data base, using each and every fragment of information available. Policy prescriptions made on the basis of such data, heralded as pragmatic responses to 'the facts', were typically the result of an intuitive reaction to perceived difficulties in which the implicit model seldom if ever surfaced. These thoughts are in a most striking fashion underlined in Philip Daniel's 'Africanization, nationalization and Inequality: Mining Labour and the Copperbelt in Zambian Development' (Cambridge, 1979). This book is reviewed in this paper. Notes.
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