Towards a Socio-Liberal Theory of World Development is a systematic, quantitative study on the determinants of world development from the 1960s onwards, using advanced statistical techniques and data from up to 171 countries and territories.

The study confirms the empirical validity of socio-liberal strategies of development, already inherent in the writings of development theorists and the leading thinkers of social democracy in the 1920s and 1930s in Europe, theories that stress the necessity of socio-economic reform in a framework of political democracy and a critique of the mere substitution of private capitalism by state capitalism.

Today it is the combination of land and social reform, and capitalist development, which explains the ascent of some countries, most notably in East and Southeast Asia, while other regions of the world economy, like the former communist world in Eastern Europe, are affected by a growing semi-peripheralization.

The authors analyze these world-wide perspectives in the framework of long cycles of capitalist development, and also debate the prospects for Eastern Europe and the former USSR and the prospects for reform in the industrialized West in a quantitative structure.