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An exploration of development?s contradictions lends a new understanding for economic reforms in the developing world. The paper contextualizes development strategies from the post-colonial era up to the present experiment with neoliberal reforms, drawing on the experiences of India, Indonesia, and Peru to demonstrate a continuum in the developing world. Over the last fifty or so years, access to capital for the developing world necessarily means accepting the accompanying development strategy. The paper will explore three significant periods, import substitution, export-oriented growth and now free market reforms, in tandem with the market trends of the lending states. This study reveals, vis-à-vis primary materials and empirical studies, aid is a misnomer. Aid of the last fifty years to the developing world has almost exclusively been in the form of loans and investments. This translates into interest and dividends for those with capital and aid, help, really aids both parties. However, with capital also comes policy and the borrowing state must simultaneously enact reforms that give foreign capital awesome domestic independence. Thus power in the context of capital and policy, the state and the non-state actor, is explored over the last half-century as it is power that explains the connections that lie in the three periods of development covered. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The conventional wisdom of the coalition politics debate says that a democratic state with a weak center should not be able to enact serious policy changes. And yet India since the 1990s has made significant headway with economic reforms all the while with a weak center. India is an anomaly but that is only if the concerned party focuses exclusively on the domestic political developments. The development discourse to date focuses almost exclusively on the domestic aspect of reforms and in order to understand India?s reform process one must at once examine the domestics, both politics and market developments, but so too the implications of external linkages on the coalition formation and sustainability of reforms. In this light, the paper will examine the coalition interests involved and the impact of the collapse of the Soviet Union and how these two areas in fact overlap. To date there lacks a comprehensive authoritative account for the impact of the collapse of the Soviet Union on India and India?s economy. Findings from this proposed study represent an initial step towards such an account. It is through the vantage, the coalition interests, that power comes to the fore, primarily in the form of market and military. Power must be traced both at the domestic and global levels, and hence the relevance of the collapse and how this shaped power at India?s domestic level. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]