ENGINEERING FOR DEVELOPMENT
(First Draft)
E J Jefferies
David Jefferies' home pages, and background to this book.
Ted Jefferies worked on Uranium extraction for the Chalk River research reactor at ICI during WWII. After that he spent time working with Sir John Cockcroft, building research reactors at AERE Harwell, UK. Then they wanted him to make bombs, so he left AERE and joined the overseas development activity. This draft unpublished book was written after 18 years work for the Nigerian Civil Service, where he established FIIRO, the Federal Institute of Industrial Research at Oshodi, (still going strong in 1997) and then for the United Nations in Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Sri Lanka (then Ceylon), Afghanistan, Argentina, Uganda, and New York.
The thesis of this book is that the gap between rich and poor countries is growing, and cannot be narrowed without producing explosive growth of 25% pa in the third world countries. In this book he tries to show how that might be done. It is arguable that since this book was drafted, the growth rates that he suggested have been approached by the successful Pacific Rim countries. Other countries have not been so fortunate and the technology and economic gap continues to increase.
It seems appropriate to publish this book draft on the web now as it is a historical document, it may be of some interest, and it has no chance of revision now E.J.Jefferies has died.
Copyright is vested in David Jefferies. I am grateful to the University of Surrey for providing the web page space, and to Karen Arthur for typing the carbon copy MS onto disk. Imperfections in the text are the responsibility of the author, Edward John Jefferies.
March 1969
CONTENTS
PART 1 THE WORLD DEVELOPMENT PROGRAMME
Chapter
1 Introduction
Chapter
2 Closing the Gap
Chapter
3 Resistance to Change
Chapter
4 International Technical Assistance
PART II AN ENGINEERING APPROACH TO A PLAN FOR A COUNTRY
Chapter
5 Outline of the Approach
Chapter
6 Setting the Problem
Chapter
7 Basic, Concepts, Terms and Definitions
Chapter
8 Background Data Available
Chapter
9 The Starting Point for a Case Study
Chapter
10 Preliminary Calculations
Chapter
11 Patterns of Economic Growth
Chapter
12 Development Plan for Year 1
Chapter
13 Development Plan for Year 2
Chapter
14 Development Plan for Year 3
Chapter
15 Review of Changes During the Three Years
Chapter
16 The Control of Development
Chapter
17 Financing the Development
PART III THE
IMPLICATIONS OF RAPID GROWTH
Chapter
18 Economic Growth and Technological Changes in Rural Communities
Chapter
19 The Influence of Agriculture on Industrial Development
Chapter
20 The Role of Manufacturing Industry
Chapter
21 The Contribution of Industrial Engineering to a Solution
PART IV DESIGNING FOR BALANCE IN DEVELOPMENT
Chapter
22 The Prediction of New Manufacturing Capacity Requirements by
Product Group
Chapter
23 The Productivity of Labour
Chapter
24 The Growth of Productivity
Chapter
25 The Calculation of Appropriate Levels of Productivity in New
Plants
FOREWORD
This volume represents some of my reactions as an engineer to the wide range of problems encountered in planning the early stages of industrialisation of developing countries. Basically, I have attempted to define the place and importance of "Engineering", using the term in its oldest and widest sense, in the context of the struggle to induce economic and social development in the hundred or so countries not yet integrated into the modern world. This can only be done by ranging widely through fields apparently remote from industry and engineering; by making some attempt to reduce these to the same terms as those used to express the basic logic of engineering; and by making comparisons on a quantitative basis wherever possible. In this light, it becomes apparent that industrialisation, agricultural development, world trade and national economics need to be approached as offshoots of the wider problem of the development of people as individuals, as communities, and as political and economic groupings.
It is also apparent that much greater cross-fertilisation between disciplines could be useful. This is illustrated in my suggestion to apply the principles of industrial process control to the balance of production, import, consumption and export by setting up proportional feed-back systems to operate on the many factors which determine these. The detailed design of such a system would be a most complex problem in process control, with several hundreds of interacting flows to be controlled simultaneously to produce a specified result. The most difficult part of such an operation would be to arrive at a widely acceptable definition of the results it is desired to achieve, and the limitations under which it must be achieved.
The chapters on productivity calculations shows how non-industrial and non-engineering factors can be incorporated in the design of factories where the agreed objective is extended beyond their individual financial security and commercial profitability to include the acceleration and balancing of overall economic development. Here again, the more difficult phase will be arriving at agreement on objectives and on how much weight these may carry where they clash with normal commercial objectives.
The background theme is that conventional methods of development as at present being practised in developing countries - largely by imposition, or at least under guidance from agencies outside the country - have now been demonstrated to be ineffective; and that if future strife arising from the widening economic gaps between countries is to be avoided new methods must be sought out and applied. Industrial engineers are skilled in designing productive undertakings and in innovation in m ethods and organisation to meet specific requirements and constraints. Their disciplines and thought processes can be adapted to new and wider problems where the end products required are social and economic development, of which the development of indus trial productive capacity is only one phase.
Many practising economists consider it useless to discuss the possibility of development fast enough to begin to close the gap between the poorer and the richer nations, since to them it is clearly impossible. This may be so, using the conventional approach, but to accept it without further question may also imply acceptance that a solution will be forced on us perhaps by a third world war or by something equally calamitous. In any case, any search for a solution must start from an evaluation of the changes which would be implicit in its application.