For instance, I don’t agree that “…they are more likely to demand the good and services which, because of transaction costs, are best produced and procured locally, thereby spurring industrialization.” Services: yes; goods: only partly. In places I spend time in Africa cheap Chinese goods are circulated massively, whereas local goods are primarily food and other “excess commodities” like fashion items, music and other cultural goods not subject to pressures to head economies of scale.

Industrialization has taken a new tenor in a globalized world, and even deep pockets of African life are increasingly integrated (unequally) in global commodity flows. Industrialization was process with history and place, it is not a universal telos. Africa needn’t industrialize as the western model has attempted to define, rather, technology, interconnection, service economies and, unfortunately, extractive economies are the future, not just the past.

Does Sen include industrialization in his definition of development? Right, I didn’t think so.

http://books.google.de/books/about/Development_as_Freedom.html?hl=de&id=Qm8HtpFHYecC