“Long dismissed as ideological representatives of the dominant powers, liberal economists have never experienced the pessimism of many modern Marxists regarding economic development of the periphery. It has come as something of a shock to Marxian writers that the empirical evidence on economic growth in the periphery since the Second World War has borne out much of the liberal case. Those countries which adopted strategies of export-oriented growth have achieved the most spectacular performance, while countries favouring self-sufficiency have done relatively poorly. Countries which have resisted distorting market prices have out-performed the heavily interventionist backward economies, which have in varying degrees emulated the Soviet model and and replaced economic mechanisms with direct controls and administrative allocation.”