EN
The author makes an attempt at analyzing Myrdal's principle of indirect causality in a close relation to conditions of economic development in countries belonging to the so-called Third World. In the first part of the article, there are presented the main ideas contained in critique of traditional economic approaches to the problem of economic backwardness as performed in numerous works of Myrdal. It is followed by discussion of the mechanism characterizing operation of cumulative indirect processes based on the example of the Negro problem in the United States. The article analyzes also the role attributed by Myrdal to cumulative processes in the economic development of the less-developed countries.