Pattern of demand in underdeveloped structures

The way in which the social product is distributed among the members of the community is doubtedly one of the most significant features of the economic structure. This aspect is particularly important in the case of underdeveloped economies. The preponderance of exogenous factors, such as the external demand for a few primary products subject to shortrun fluctuations in price, as well as the considerable disparity between the remuneration of factors of production and their opportunity costs in productive use, both in the export sector and in the sectors most affected by modern technology, tend to compartmentalise economic decisions, giving rise to demand schedules with characteristic discontinuities, each segment displaying different behaviour patterns or trends. Thus, in a given phase of expansion of the domestic product, one group of consumers may show a rapid advance in purchasing power while another remains stationary; or one group, benefiting from a rise in the real income of its members, may diversify its demand schedule through the inclusion of higher quality goods, while another grows horizontally, that is, through the addition of new members to the group without any change in the demand schedule of existing members. Traditional economic analysis blurred the perception of these problems, based as it was on assumptions of homogeneous factors and of an identical technological horizon for all decision-making agents related to production. For an understanding of the problems of underdevelopment we must start with different hypotheses.