Richard Doner

Emory University | EU · Department of Political Science

This book offers a political economy explanation for the striking cross-national differences in strategies and performance among East Asia’s automotive industries. Some countries—China, South Korea, and Taiwan—have successfully pursued “intensive” growth strategies by increasing local value added based on domestic inputs and technological competenc...

Since the 1990s, scholars and international organizations such as the World Bank have recognized the centrality of institutions for development. While important, this “institutional turn” has generally minimized the diversity of development challenges and the corresponding need for different institutional capacities. Yet distinguishing among develo...

This article analyses variations in the provision (breadth and depth) of skill formation through technical and vocational education (TVE) in secondary education in middle-income countries. A growing consensus blames productivity stagnation for the middle-income trap and advocates more human capital to boost productivity. Building on the extensive p...

Since the mid-2000s, economists in both academia and development multilaterals have drawn increasing attention to the middle-income (MI) trap, especially in Southeast Asia and Latin America. Their writings have been valuable in identifying and defining the trap, in exploring its proximate sources (especially productivity slowdowns), in recommending...

Despite the deleterious impact of the 2008–09 global financial crisis, which seriously undermined mainstream economists’ claims that the world economy has matured enough to prevent the return of a global depression, policymakers are still grappling with unchartered territory to insulate their economies from debilitating regional and global contagio...

The automotive industries of Southeast Asia have grown significantly but unevenly. Thailand has outperformed its neighbours in Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines with regard to production and, most notably, export volumes. But the Thai auto industry has not exhibited the level of local (indigenous) technology capacity and input growth seen in...

Thailand has achieved impressive and consistent GDP growth over the past half century in large part through extensive economic diversification. Despite these gains, there is growing evidence that Thailand suffers from a significant gap between the advanced nature of its export structure and the much more modest technological levels of its own firms...

This paper explores the capacities for sustained growth in the export-oriented countries of Southeast Asia, with a focus on Vietnam, Malaysia and Thailand. The paper is especially concerned with the prospects for "upgrading" and moving beyond the "middle-income trap" in Malaysia and Thailand. But the core argument for all three countries is similar...

The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Politics. By Li Tania Murray. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. 392p. $89.95 cloth, $22.45 paper. Taking Southeast Asia to Market: Commodities, Nature and People in the Neoliberal Age. Edited by Nevins Joseph and Peluso Nancy Lee. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 200...

In this article, we seek to rectify the absence of political analysis characterizing most literature on innovation and development. Although existing research is careful to note the lack of any single recipe or model of innovation, most scholars identify a range of institutions and policies influencing innovative performance. But such explanations...

In this article, we seek to rectify the absence of political analysis characterizing most literature on innovation and development. Although existing research is careful to note the lack of any single recipe or model of innovation, most scholars identify a range of institutions and policies influencing innovative performance. But such explanations...

This article analyzes university–industry linkages (UILs) in Thailand at the national level and in four sectors (automotive, textiles–garments, agro-industry, and electronics). Public officials and firm managers recognize the importance of UILs for meeting challenges facing Thai producers. But with interesting exceptions, Thai UILs are frail. This...

Rationalization and stabilization following the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s combined with the expansion and liberalization of regional and global trade to create significant parts industries in China, Indonesia, and the Republic of Korea. Conventional policies of stabilization and liberalization, however, cannot fully explain growth pa...

Scholars of development have learned a great deal about what economic institutions do, but much less about the origins of such arrangements. This article introduces and assesses a new political explanation for the origins of developmental states organizational complexes in which expert and coherent bureaucratic agencies collaborate with organized p...

Negotiations for China's accession to the WTO provoked a debate between pessimists who believed that opening the economy would lead to a flood of imports and a de-nationalization of manufacturing industry, and those who believed that it would spur rationalization of state-owned enterprises, lock in domestic reforms, attract foreign investment, and...

Why do some economies grow for several years and then stall? One obvious answer is that these economies have “overheated.” Another is that foreign demand for their products has dried up. This article explores a longer-term explanation—namely, that the institutions favorable for one stage of economic growth are less suitable for a subsequent stage....

The growing interconnectedness of national economies and an expanding awareness of global interdependence in the 1990s have generated lively debate over the future of national governance. In a world of mobile capital, are states vital to the social and economic wellbeing of their citizens? A number of changes in the state's domestic and internation...

Technology policies, and economic policies more generally, are means by which countries can maintain or increase their autonomy within the international political economy. Concretely, autonomy in this sense refers to a country's capacity to adapt to or insulate domestic industry from external shifts. An important component of this capacity for more...

Alice Amsden is one of the founders of the “statist” or “revisionist” school of East Asian economic development. Her earlier book, Asia's Next Giant (1989), refuted claims that growth in South Korea and other Newly Industrialized Countries was simply a function of high investment rates and correct prices, based in turn on the small-government funda...

The concepts of rents and rent-seeking are central to any discussion of the processes of economic development. Yet conventional models of rent-seeking are unable to explain how it can drive decades of rapid growth in some countries, and at other times be associated with spectacular economic crises. This book argues that the rent-seeking framework h...

With the demise of development economics in the 1970s, the academic discipline of economics had little specific theorizing on development to offer practioners and proffered instead universal, liberal nostrums of free trade and free markets (Wing, 1990WING, Woo. (1990). “The Art of Economic Development: Markets, Politics and Externalities”. Internat...

Most current theoretical treatments view business associations as rent-seeking, special interest groups. Yet, empirical research in a wide range of developing countries reveals a broad range of functions and activities undertaken by business associations, many of which promote efficiency. These positive functions address crucial development issues...

For most social scientists, business associations are presumed to lobby for particular benefits and, if successful, associations thereby impede overall growth. While this presumption is warranted in many cases, this paper documents a wide range of empirical cases where associations enhance economic performance, generally by reducing information and...

This article examines postimperialist claims that foreign investment provides opportunities for local capitalists in less-developed countries to strengthen themselves economically. Its focus is the Thai textile industry. The article examines complementarities between foreign investors and local capitalists, the kinds of disputes which have emerged...

Analyses of economic growth have drawn on the experiences of the East Asian newly industrializing countries to highlight the contribution of cohesive and autonomous states in the resolution of market failures. Within an explicit collective action and public goods framework, this article argues for an institutionalist approach to development that in...

Richard F. Doner, in reference to Southeast Asia, asserts the need to broaden the discussion of economic growth to include political economy, which he defines as "the ways politics influences aspects of economic policymaking," and, in turn, how economic activity influences the political process. He points out that dependency theory has the value of...

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Takes the Thai automobile industry as a case study to explain how the balance in the relationship between TNCs, domestic private capital, and the state acts as a crucial determinant in growth rates in East Asian NICs. Argues that previous studies have tended to over-emphasise the dominance of TNCs and have correspondingly overemphasised the benefit...

and two anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments on this and earlier drafts. I alone am responsible for the errors that remain. 2 Abstract The extent to which countries are able to innovate and progress technologically depends critically on their innovation system. This system interacts in complex and unique ways to further or hinder inn...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Berkeley, 1987. Includes bibliographical references. Microfilm.

Proefschrift Berkeley, Calif. : University of California.