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6 - The supply of capital and entrepreneurship

from PART I - GENERAL – THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 January 2010

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Summary

In the literature on economic growth the suppliers of capital have always figured prominently as the prime movers in the process. Since, however, the removal of the ramifications of capital as a means of controlling productive agents and the immediate environment of production and its reduction to a simple factor of production left practically no indispensable function for the capitalist, he had to be smuggled in as the manager, the organizer, or the entrepreneur. Under-developed countries, including India, are supposed to suffer from an acute shortage of capital not only in the tautological sense that the measured amount of capital located in these countries is small, but also in the functional sense that they are incapable of supplying the amount of capital demanded by the developmental process. This incapacity is supposed to spring from two sources, viz. the absolute poverty of ordinary people, and the unwillingness of the rich to invest money for worthwhile enterprises. In the vulgar sociology which some of these explanations affect, it is claimed further that the only effective suppliers of capital are businessmen, and that the feudal or other pre-capitalist remnants of upper-income groups which were preserved by the imperial power usually do not play any constructive part in the productive process. According to this view, the major dynamic element operating in the Indian economy was foreign enterprise which came endowed with the virtues of willingness to bear risk in industrial enterprises and the ability to innovate.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1972

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