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Evaluating Country Programmes
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vision of connecting Alaska to Tierra del Fuego by road ended in the 1970s with the
decision not to traverse the Darién Gap in Panama), but its value to Costa Rica was
immediate and great.
Much of the technical assistance provided during this period had large payoffs
for Costa Rica, and older Costa Rican officials recall those days as a period of excitement
and great achievement. STICA activities were relatively simple, but they introduced
a variety of techniques to the region’s farmers. Because they were profitable,
their use spread rapidly. STICA tended to identify and work with the most progressive
farmers under the assumption that their successful innovations would be copied.
In general, technical assistance seems to have succeeded because it represented
the first introduction of scientific approaches into a traditional environment.
The relative isolation of Costa Rica, its poor communications with the rest of the
world, and a lack of alternative means of transmitting information made for big gains
in knowledge. Nevertheless, servicios run by Americans outside the formal structure
of ministries were not a viable long-term approach, and the transfer of Americans
into advisory roles to Costa Rican ministries was inevitable.
High Development: USAID and the alliance for progress (1961-72)
By the end of the 1950s, the era of economic development had arrived. The
Marshall Plan had revived Western Europe’s economy much faster than anyone had
expected. Western European economic integration was proceeding, and free trade
in the region seemed to be an important factor in its growing prosperity. The
post-World War II decolonisation effort had evolved into a global war on poverty.
The UN labelled the 1960s the Decade of Development.
In the United States, foreign aid became a campaign issue in the 1960 presidential
election, when candidate John Kennedy called for expanded aid to fight the
communist threat by reducing poverty in developing countries. In March 1961,
President Kennedy proposed creating the US Agency for International Development,
a considerable expansion from its predecessor, the International Cooperation
Administration. US concern for communism and poverty was particularly
acute in Latin America, where riots during Vice President Nixon’s visit in 1958 and
the Cuban revolution of 1959 made vivid impressions on the US public. With its proposal
to create USAID, the Kennedy Administration also proposed a multilateral
Alliance for Progress in the Western Hemisphere.
One of Kennedy’s leading advisers, Walter Rostow, was particularly influential.
He believed the administration should eliminate strictures placed on economic
growth by traditional attitudes and interest groups. Once these bonds were broken,
the economy would take off into the blue skies of modernisation. The resulting
mass education and advance of modern technology would make economic growth
almost automatic. The apparent success of the US Government’s Operation
Bootstrap in Puerto Rico in the 1950s buttressed this optimism. Teodoro Moscoso,
OECD 1999