Developmental States beyond East Asia

Jewellord T. Nem Singh, Jesse Salah Ovadia, Jewellord T. Nem Singh, Jesse Salah Ovadia

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367728458
• eBook ISBN: 9780429619120
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This comprehensive volume reviews recent scholarship regarding the role of the state in economic development. With a wide range of case studies of both successful and failed state-led development, the authors push the analysis of the developmental state beyond its original limitations and into the 21st century.

New policies, institutional configurations, and state-market relations are emerging outside of East Asia, as new developmental states move beyond the historical experience of East Asian development. The authors argue for the continued relevance of the 'developmental state' and for understanding globalization and structural transformation through the lens of this approach. They further this concept by applying it to analyses of China, Latin America, and Africa, as well as to new frontiers of state-led development in Japan and the East Asian developmental states. This book expands the scope of research on state-led development to encompass new theoretical and methodological innovations and new topics such as governance, institution building, industrial policy, and the role of extractive industries.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Third World Quarterly.

The theory and practice of building developmental states in the Global South

Jewellord Nem Singh

and Jesse Salah Ovadia

ABSTRACT

Reviewing decades of thinking regarding the role of the state in economic development, we argue for the continued relevance of the concept of the ‘developmental state’. With reference to Argentina, Brazil, Ethiopia, Rwanda and China, we contend that new developmental states are evidence of a move beyond the historical experience of East Asian development. Further, we argue for the applicability of the developmental state framework to key questions of governance, institution building, industrial policy and the extractive industries, as well as to a wide variety of cases of successful and failed state-led development in the early twenty-first century.

Development is essentially a record of how one thing leads to another.

Albert Hirschman¹

Development, often understood in economic terms as the structural transformation of the national economy, has been an elusive objective for many outside the advanced industrialised countries of the West. Despite the multitude of reforms rooted in the economic modernisation paradigm of the 1950s, very few countries have succeeded in realising sustained, rapid industrial development. The intellectual history of this debate stems from questions around which policies can deliver economic growth and why countries failed to take off and experience similar economic transition.

The exceptionalism of East Asia’s success, therefore, generated a vibrant debate centred on the extent to which policy choices, institutional dynamics and external circumstances have shaped economic development. As our special issue collectively suggests, the politics underpinning development planning is a key determinant of the outcomes of policy-making. Without understanding the political basis of development, one becomes excessively focussed on policy design as the explanation to the success of East Asia.

Jewellord Nem Singh

http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5216-4408;

Jesse Salah Ovadia

http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5010-8269

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.

The collection builds on long-standing debates on state transformation and contributes to a richer understanding of the politics of growth in the context of global market integration. While high export prices translate into greater rents and new competitive advantages are crafted with strong state support, a lacuna exists in explaining how and why some governments are able to craft development strategies that create and sustain new sources of growth. Owing to disillusionment from international financial institutions (IFIs) that advised or insisted upon structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) and counselled against state interference, the post-2000 period was marked by profound inspiration to emulate – if not replicate – the development strategies of East Asia, which led to rapid, sustained industrialisation in less than 50 years.² We provide some tentative answers through several cases, for example Brazil under Lula da Silva’s Workers’ Party (PT), Argentina under Nestor Kirschner and Ethiopia under the Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), whereby new developmentalist thinking has shaped policy choices in the twenty-first century.³ Beyond country cases, we likewise identify non-traditional pathways of growth, particularly through natural resources, which require new ways of managing the national economy. We suggest that important lessons can be drawn from those who appear to be succeeding, those who may have succeeded for a time and those who have tried and failed.

Our special issue directly engages the ‘transferability’ debate: that is, the extent to which the developmental state (DS) model(s) can be adapted beyond East Asia’s geographical, socio-political and historical conditions to provide alternative ways of doing development in the Global South. We carefully selected papers to answer three inter-related questions:

1. Given that the DS model(s) emerged within specific conditions, what generic policies and state institutions can inform contemporary governing elites to address the challenge of economic and social development?
2. In states with weak capacity and legacies of inequality, oppression and colonial rule, what theoretical and methodological approaches will enable scholars to examine states with political intent and institutional capacity to promote industrialisation?
3. In reflecting the evolution of development paradigms and the movement beyond old models of ‘developmental authoritarianism’, what lessons arise from how do political elites in East Asian developmental states face rising challenges to economic governance and to what extent have they been successful in managing economic globalisation and addressing sustainable development?

Each paper interrogates one or two key aspects of the DS model(s), then critically engages with the theory and builds new insights either through new empirical evidence or re-appraisal of conventional wisdom regarding DS theory. Collectively, we examine economic and political development in the Global South in the context of economic globalisation; consequently, the case studies reflect on how old models of developmental authoritarianism remain compatible with global democratisation. Our introduction offers an overview of t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Endorsements
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction: The theory and practice of building developmental states in the Global South
• Part I: Rethinking the developmental state concept
• Part II: National experiences of building developmental states
• Part III: New dynamics for developmental states in the international political economy
• Index