Development is based on the presentation of the whole world as a picture so that the whole can be influenced in some way forming a system or structure. The need to compose the world as a picture is the core of all economic theories. Many scientists consider the development economics to be dead. There is no sense to change something which people cannot change. The poverty of developing countries and the wealth of the dominant ones should be taken as it is. It is impossible to get rid of poverty all over the world. Those who are rich become richer and those who are poor become poorer.
The development of the economy in European history is one of the most fundamental chapters in the history of modernity. The notions of economy, market and production are historical contingencies. The Western economy is considered to be a production system. Economy is a cultural production, a way of producing human subjects and social orders of a certain kind. The economy had to be given expression by a proper science. This science was called political economy which emerged in the eighteenth century. According to Smith, Ricardo and Marx political economy is connected with the notions of production and labor. Economics is a discourse that constructs a particular picture of the economy. Any model of the construction of the world is debatable and subjective. Different models of economy were appropriated, suppressed or overlooked. The critique of the economics as a culture should be distinguished from McCloskey’s economics as rhetoric.
Certain historical conditions and circumstances changed the notion of economy during the last centuries. There are a lot of different approaches to the notion of economics. Nevertheless, all these approaches aim at the solving the problem of the poverty and promoting economic development of all countries. According to the classical theory, economy would reach a point at which wages would rise above the subsistence minimum thus squeezing profits down to the point where the investment would stop, wages would drop again, technological progress would make labor more productive and growth would resume. According to Ricardo, the main problem of the modern economy is the laws that regulate the distribution of rents, profits and wages. In this model the labor is the basis of all value. This theory was extruded by Jevons’ aims of economy as the satisfaction of our needs and maximizing comfort and pleasure.
There are a lot of theories of economic development. They may be differentiated as classical, structuralist, neoclassical and dependency theories. The classical theorists are Adam Smith, Rostow and Lewis. Adam Smith considers the increase of stock capital and improving of labor force to be the main sources of economic development. Rostow argues that it is possible to transform some leading sectors in economy which propel the economy forward. Structuralist or Keynesian theorists consider economic development as the transformation of the structure of the production following the demands and make more productive use of technology. According to the neoclassical theories, the capital accumulation plays the crucial role in the economic development. The dependency theories treat the world economy as the markets which depend on each other in commodities, capital and labor power and the transference of resources from the dependent countries to the dominant ones. It is the main reason which hampers the economic development of the countries of the Third World and promotes the development of the USA.