The concepts development and underdevelopmenthave only been widely used in their present sense since the end of the Second World War. For much of modern history, the economic and social divisions of the world were understood as expressions of natural differences in race and climate. Differences in income were treated in much the same way as differences, say, in rainfall and as late as 1930, a senior British administrator could blandly comment that average per capita income of $30 in Ghana compared not unfavourably with $80 in Britain. In the colonial mind, the world was divided into civilized men and natives and the gulf that divided them as considered unbridgeable− at least in the foreseeable future. Attitudes have now changed and the view of the world embodied in the concepts development and underdevelopmentno longer holds the division to be permanent and fixed. Underdevelopment implies development in a way that barbarism never implied civilization. The difference between an underdeveloped country and a developed one is of degree rather than kind and the very use of these terms suggests that they are differences that can and should be overcome. It is, to say the least, a more positive outlook.
