THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF DEPENDENCY, INFLATION AND POLITICAL INSTABILITY AMONG LESS DEVELOPED COUNTRIES: AN EXPLORATORY ANALYSIS

This study is concerned with the interrelationships among several problems that afflict less developed countries: dependency, inflation and political instability. Though there are substantial literatures that address these problems singly, the potential linkages among them remain largely unexplored. What are the factors or processes that create and perpetuate inflation and political instability within less developed countries? In an attempt to answer this question, this study integrates the politics of inflation and the economics of political instability within less developed countries by examining their relationship to international economic dependency. Hence, the research is predicated on the following loose causal ordering: economic dependency to inflation to political instability. Chapter one specifies these problems confronting the less developed countries and provides the conceptual and methodological framework upon which this study is based. Chapter two reviews the literature on dependency, inflation and political instability by outlining the existing theoretical propositions and empirical work. Chapter three integrates the fragmented pieces of theory for these problem areas to provide the rationale of the research task at hand and stresses at that point the need for a new perspective from which to view these problems--an international perspective from which new sources of theory can be derived. Chapter four outlines the research design of the study and indicates how data and method can be brought to bear on the research questions at issue. More specifically, this study employs a cross-sectional design containing a fairly large sample of less developed countries covering the period, 1960-1970. Pearson correlation, canonical correlation and least-squares multiple regression techniques are utilized in the data analysis. Chapter five reports the empirical findings of the study which, in general, tend not to support dependency propositions. No set of variables, dependency, structural or monetary, does very well explaining the variation in rates of inflation among the less developed countries. There are, however, some positive and significant associations between indicators of dependency and political instability. The concluding chapter has the purpose of summarizing the findings, speculating on areas of possible future research, and assessing the national and international policy relevance of the problems and findings