The rich countries had started down that path earlier, so naturally they were more advanced than newly independent countries. The way for the latecomers to catch up was to emulate the early birds. Unless one accepts that the laws of economics codified in Western textbooks are universal, it does not stand to reason that the application of the laws to the different cultures of Africa, Asia and South America will automatically yield identical economic results to those of the west. All countries do not move in a linear fashion along the same track. Moreover, dependency theorists like Dos Santos contend that such a view understates the extent to which economic progress in the rich Northern countries was based on exploitation of the currently underdeveloped regions, and that if the latter were to follow the pattern of development of the North, they would have to look for colonies to exploit.
Structural adjustment embodies the goals of neoclassical theory.
It places the market at centre stage, assigns the state a secondary role in development, and puts its faith in the potential of unfettered individual initiative, creativity, and ingenuity. It comes at the cost of lost capacity of the state to make important long-term investments, and has become a means of redistributing economic and political power. One should question the representation of what has occurred. It raises doubts about the validity of the analytical model, which is implicit in the policy prescriptions. It appears that further conceptual and empirical analysis is required before providing the prescription.