SOCIAL SCIENTIST Noam Chomsky (1993) has aptly called one of his books Year 501. The Conquest Continues, suggesting that what started with the conquest of Latin America by Columbus in 1491 has never ceased during the next five centuries. It may be recalled that the World Bank (World Development Report 1987) had forcefully argued that outward orientation did pay off in terms of higher investment, higher output and higher exports. In its typology, strongly outward orientation was considered synonymous with the acceptance of the global liberal and privatised economy, and did make countries grow stronger than moderately outward oriented countries and then inward oriented countries. Its listing of the strongly outward oriented countries was statistically unreliable (it contained only 4 countries: South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong) and could lead the argument the other way round. The countries which had done reasonably well, and which on that basis had achieved a fair amount of outward linkages, happen to be countries which erected a state-protected import-substitution industry. Robert Wade (1990) reminds us that Syngman Rhee and Chiang Kai-shek had the necessary state power, supported by American military might, to implement harsh measures and eliminate the feudal and parasitic elements in the economy. Singapore and Hong Kong as well had authoritarian regimes. This was also the case which countries which had done fairly well in a later period (Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, and of course China and Vietnam). Paul Baran's diagnosis of the pathology seems to have come through with the passing of time. He isolated monopoly industry as an essential feature of the morphology of backwardness, extending the merchant phase of capitalism by obstructing the transition of capital and men from the sphere of circulation to the sphere of production. Capitalism in the developing countries henceforth had a twisted track: 'Having lived through all the pains and frustrations of childhood, it never experienced the vigor and exuberance of youth, and began displaying at an early age all the grievous features of senility and decadence. To the dead-weight of stagnation characteristic of pre-industrial society was added the restrictive impact of monopoly capitalism (Baran 1962: 210). Development aid, it could be reminded, has never been as low as in the 1990s. The pious commitment made at the beginning of the first development decade in 1970 to commit 1 % of GNP, has never been fulfilled by the OECD cluster. Effective allocation of the US, the UK and Germany in 1997, as per the OECD, DAC statistics, was as low as 0.10 %, 0.28 % and 0.31 % respectively. The OECD average amounted to 0.27 % only.