Planning for a Just Society: Illusion and Reality

Against the backdrop of the shift from the growth-centred to the poverty-focused strategy of development, this paper seeks to highlight a number of false trails pursued in tackling the problem of economic development which have obstructed understanding and misled practice. This is attributed by the author primarily to three factors: economists' ahistoric approach, their treatment of economics as an 'isolated system' and their failure to consider the State as a problem in political economy, in spite of their concern with the nature and impact of state intervention.