Social Systems Delimitation and Allocative Mechanisms

Abstract

Development administration literature overemphasizes a market-exchange approach to national resource allocation. Lacking a systematic analysis of extra-marker, one- way transfers, this literature leaves unaddressed both the technical failures of the market and its tendency to overexpand and impose its operational logic on the rest of society. This article argues for utilizing public budgetary transfers to delimit the market and help create work units that can be productive without having to subject their members to the impersonal, excessively functional and unidimensional modes of interaction characteristic of market relationships. The concept of substantive- synergistic budgeting is introduced as the operational tool of the suggested model.