Arthur Lewis’ Dualism, the Literature of Development Economics, and the Less Developed Economies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Almost 60 years ago, Arthur Lewis published his seminal, classically-based dualism paper. Assuming a modern capitalist sector in urban centers of the LDCs and a traditional agricultural sector with an unlimited supply of labor in their rural areas, the policy implications of the model was that with the right mix of economic policies and resources, the disguised unemployed labor of the rural sector will eventually be absorbed into the modern capitalist sector, thus, transforming the poor underdeveloped economies into modern dynamic ones. Obviously this transformation did not take place. Instead, the migration of the traditional agricultural workers to the cities gave rise to another dualism, the formal-informal dichotomy. In this paper, after discussing the Lewis model, its significance to the history of development economics and its refinements by Fei, Ranis and others, the causes of the failure of the model will be explored. It will be argued that the assumptions of this classically-based model did not fit the realities of most contemporary LDCs, and that it could not predict the rise, or the significance, of the informal economy in the LDCs. Next, the various dimensions, causes, characteristics, and significance of the much neglected informal sector in the LDCs will be explained.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".