This important book deals with two issues: the emancipation of the Third World from the debt system and the reappropriation of development by civil society through financial self-reliance.

The author begins by analyzing the failure of 50 years of externally financed development. He shows how the foreign aid system has had the perverse effect of downplaying the role of domestic savings and creating a chronic economic and technological dependency. Massive foreign aid also subverted the political process in many Third World countries by giving birth to a new class which Gelinas calls the "aidocracy". He traces the roots of autonomous development based on domestic capital accumulation and highlights the much neglected resource that exists in even the poorest countries: savings. This kind of development, already at work in the "people's economy", can only begin at the grassroots, not at the level of the state.

Critical of the foreign aid industry, Gelinas asserts that true international cooperation defined as external support for an internal dynamic remains useful and necessary. The issue for the North should not be to give more, but to take less.