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On the Emergence of Developmental States in the Twenty-First Century: Urgency or Agency?
Abstract
This chapter looks at the origins of the classic developmental states and differentiates between the agency and urgency views explaining the emergence of developmentalist institutions and policies in the twentieth century. By recalling the experiences of the Northeast Asian model-cases it puts special emphasis on the political-economic explanation of Doner et al. (International Organization 59(2): 327–361, 2005), the so-called systemic vulnerability concept, and aims to apply its logic and reinterpret its mechanisms under the new circumstances of the twenty-first century. First it reveals the changes in the external conditions of aspirational developmental states in the first two decades after the Millennium, and highlights the dynamics of contextual changes both in economic and political terms. Then it turns towards the domestic arena and aims to provide a political economy interpretation of the challenges of building developmentalist institutions and strategies in the twenty-first century. The aim is to contribute to a better understanding of the scarcity of catching up success stories and re-open the debate on the origins of developmental states.
... The National Development Plan (NDP) identifies building a capable developmental state as the ultimate task to improve people's socio-economic conditions (National Planning Commission 2012). Evidence from leading developmental states such as China, South Korea, and other East Asian countries points to developmental statehood being the most efficient mechanism for alleviating people from poverty and creating globally competitive economies (Ricz 2021;Wade 2018). The East Asian countries managed to move hundreds of millions out of poverty from 1990 to 2013, more than halving the global poverty rates. ...
The South African National Development Plan (NDP) identified the mission of becoming a capable, ethical, and developmental state as the leading solution to addressing the country’s developmental challenges. The local government’s developmental service delivery role, connectedness, and proximity to South Africa’s unemployment and poverty put the local government at the epicentre of addressing
these developmental challenges. However, despite the country’s objective ofcreating a capable, ethical, and developmental state, the local government sphere has been criticised for being riddled with institutional incapacities in delivering social and economic services to citizens. This chapter reflects on the significance of the local
government sphere in South Africa’s developmental state ambition, based on the constitutionally bestowed developmental mandate. The reflection suggests that South Africa cannot become a capable developmental state, nor realise its objective of addressing poverty and unemployment, without prioritising the local government’s
institutional capacity to plan and deliver developmental outcomes. The chapter argues that through enhanced institutional capacity, coordination with other government spheres, and good governance, local government could become the engine towards the capable developmental state ambition.
... The National Development Plan (NDP) identifies building a capable developmental state as the ultimate task to improve people's socio-economic conditions (National Planning Commission 2012). Evidence from leading developmental states such as China, South Korea, and other East Asian countries points to developmental statehood being the most efficient mechanism for alleviating people from poverty and creating globally competitive economies (Ricz 2021;Wade 2018). The East Asian countries managed to move hundreds of millions out of poverty from 1990 to 2013, more than halving the global poverty rates. ...
The South African government has long understood that to address the triple challenges of poverty, unemployment, and inequality, a democratic developmental state capable of promoting inclusive economic growth is required to achieve the necessary developmental outcomes (ANC 2017). This book provides a comprehensive account of the first decade of South Africa’s National Development Plan (NDP) and its developmental state ambition. Academics, students, and policy-makers will benefit from understanding the government’s performance since adopting the NDP as the country’s development framework.
The book focuses on several key themes, such as parliamentary oversight, the performance and state of local government, state-owned enterprises, state capacity, and industrialisation in South Africa’s developmental state ambition. These elements are significant because the NDP identified them as important components towards building a capable developmental state. These areas have also been spaces of contention over the past decade, as evident in the state capture reports and the Auditor General reports on the state of local government and state institutions. The industrialisation element is important and relevant because developmental states are often judged on their ability to deliver social and economic development through industrialisation and structural transformation. These identified areas will determine whether South Africa prospers or stagnates like many African states struggling to create resilient and capable institutions. Secondly, these areas are likely to influence
the building of a state capable of alleviating millions of poverty and unemployment that the country has failed to arrest since the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis.
... A developmental state refers to a state-led economic development model that prioritizes economic growth accompanied by structural transformation as evident in East Asian developmental states (Ricz 2021). Developmental states are underpinned by a developmental and statist approach to economic development, with the political leadership dedicating state resources and capacities to pursue socio-economic outcomes (Mkandawire, 2001). ...
It is no longer debatable that the socioeconomic impact of COVID-19 caused a resurgence in the role of the state and propelled the need for novel responses reinforced by the structural component of the state. The structural component of the state refers to the administrative power, resources and capacity of the state to mitigate the impact of the pandemic in the context of COVID-19. This paper explores the relationship between the central and local states in coordinating efforts to attenuate and respond to the pandemic, and the meaning of state-led responses for South Africa's developmental state ambition. The South African government demonstrated political willingness to utilize its structural component by distributing its administrative capacity, resources and power to all the spheres of government to fight the pandemic through its stimulus package. The country's pandemic responses reveal good implications for strengthening institutional arrangements and consolidating a well-coordinated and capable developmental state. ARTICLE HISTORY
In the twenty-first century many latecomer emerging economies are embarking on development paths that are fundamentally different from the well-known classical models and are shaped by historical and socio-political conditions peculiar to their modernization experiences. We explore the new perspectives on latecomer development in this post-crisis period of global capitalism, as the ways these statist economic systems are organized and coordinated, hence their operational logic still lacks a systematic exploration and explanation. This chapter provides an overview on recent tendencies of state capitalism, present existing theoretical approaches and offer novel perspectives to analyse contemporary capitalist varieties and alternative development trajectories of the Global South and East. We focus on the post-crisis cycle, and especially highlight the need to reconsider and revise existing theories and assumptions in the light of the most recent—and ever-changing—global circumstances paved first by the COVID-19 pandemic, and by the Russian invasion in Ukraine.
Private sector is participating in corrupting of the public sector in Namibia and the conducive corrupt environment as created by the government of Namibia.
The developmental state paradigm (DSP) has traversed global south contexts from Latin America to Asia with a revival in African contexts. However, there is limited understanding of how international political economy (IPE) dynamics influence the analysis offered by the DSP. This article addresses this gap by introducing an IPE-enhanced DSP that centres interactions between the state and international capital in the analysis of industrialisation in the Ethiopian leather subsector and the role of Chinese investment. Its key finding is that these complex interactions influence and disrupt the classical roles of domestic private capital and domestic industrial demand in socio-economic transformation.
This book is the product of three years of empirical research, four years in politics, and a lifetime in a country experiencing three different regimes. Transcending disciplinary boundaries, it provides a fresh answer to a simple yet profound question: why has liberal democracy retreated?
Scheiring argues that Hungary’s new hybrid authoritarian regime emerged as a political response to the tensions of globalisation. He demonstrates how Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz exploited the rising nationalism among the working-class casualties of deindustrialisation and the national bourgeoisie to consolidate illiberal hegemony.
As the world faces a new wave of autocratisation, Hungary’s lessons become relevant across the globe, and this book represents a significant contribution to understanding challenges to democracy. This work will be useful to students and researchers across political sociology, political science, economy and social anthropology, as well democracy advocates.
An analysis of the endogenous and exogenous political and economic factors that conditioned the Partido dos Trabalhadores’s (PT) social-developmentalist project in 2003–2016 in the light of financialization and the “confidence game” conditioned by the volatility of external liquidity and commodities prices concludes that the first Lula administration faced the problem of a crisis of confidence and adopted orthodox policies but was able, with the improvement of international conditions, to launch policies of a more interventionist and distributive trend. Dilma Rousseff, facing a downright unfavorable international context, explicitly broke with the confidence game by applying the policy set of the new macroeconomic matrix. In her second term she radically reversed the policy orientation, moving toward a strong fiscal adjustment and monetary orthodoxy, and this eventually undermined her few sources of political support. The economic crisis from the second half of 2014 on undoubtedly contributed to the political crisis, which in turn made infeasible any attempt to implement policies to reverse the situation of economic crisis. Dilma’s impeachment finally interrupted the PT’s developmentalist project, allowing the emergence of new political actors.
This article investigates how the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front's (EPRDF) attempt to build a developmental state influenced and shaped its relationships with the Ethiopian private sector. Through a case study of the chambers of commerce system in Ethiopia, the research reveals that the EPRDF's relationship to the private sector was characterised by the twin objectives of (1) curbing the private sector's power to prevent challenges to the EPRDF rule and (2) mobilising the private sector as part of the ruling coalition's developmental state programme. However, these twin objectives, were, in several cases, perceived as mutually exclusive by the EPRDF which, at times, led to a focus on control at the expense of developmental objectives. The ensuing lack of embeddedness posed problems for the operationalisation of the developmental state policies, reducing the EPRDF's ability to institutionalise collaborative relationships with the private sector.
Fifteen years have passed since the seminal work of Hall and Soskice (2001) on Varieties of Capitalism (VoC), and extensive literature has emerged since then, which can be structured into possibly four generations. The first, the classical school of VoC, mostly relates to Hall and Soskice’s work (see also Amable 2003) and the differentiation of liberal market economies (LME) (e.g., the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland) and coordinated market economies (CME) (e.g., Germany, Japan, Sweden, Austria). The second generation is generally labeled post-VoC literature and aims at developing further types of capitalist models, mainly related to different regions or groups of countries. In this regard, the dependent market economy model (Nölke and Vliegenthart 2009) can be highlighted, but also the work of the Hungarian scholar Beáta Farkas (2011 and 2017), who analyzed Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries in this framework. The third generation of VoC literature is called critical comparative capitalism (CC), and it mainly deals with more critical, global approaches and most current issues such as international economic integration (e.g., the Eurozone crisis) and tries to incorporate the demand side of analysis (see e.g., Ebenau et al. 2015; Farkas 2016). A fourth generation of VoC research is currently emerging, although this differentiation is made on a rather speculative basis. There are some works and signs indicating that VoC analysis has recently (during the last two to three years) moved toward intertemporal (instead of international) comparisons attempting to define and characterize historical phases rather than simply building valid models for certain countries or world regions.
According to this theoretical structure, we see two entry points for our essay: first, emerging countries, even while gaining weight in the world economy and politics, have been generally left out by traditional VoC analysis (with some exceptions, such as Schneider 2009 and 2013; Nölke et al. 2015). Second, intertemporal comparisons are also often missing. Thus, we argue that studying historical development success stories and defining historical role models and lessons are valid research objectives.
In this paper, we go back to the hypothesis of a pro-conservative monetary policy convention in Brazil, as initially formulated by Bresser-Pereira and Nakano (2002) and Erber (2011), and add three particular sub-hypotheses to it: (i) the prevalence of high real interest rates in Brazil for decades has led to the formation of a coalition of rentier-financier interests for keeping interest rates high and the resulting "financialization from interest income"; (ii) the existence of a “two-way" public-debt contagion effect between the banking reserves market and the public securities market; (iii) the use of a high interest rate to finance current-account deficits. To this end, the paper takes as its starting point Keynes’s view of the interest rate as an eminently conventional phenomenon.
Using an original database of 385 politically connected firms under the Mubarak regime in Egypt, this chapter documents that: (1) the value of these firms went down by 13–16 percent more than non-connected firms after Mubarak was removed from power; (2) crony firms enjoyed multiple regulatory and fiscal privileges that reduced competition; (3) these firms came to dominate the financial market; and (4) the entry of connected firms in a sector reduced employment growth in these sectors. The chapter ends by speculating that a specificity of Egyptian cronyism is that it is aimed to exclude firms that may support the political opposition, and that, as a result, it was prevalent in growth-oriented sectors. This implied that it was economically costlier to maintain in Egypt when compared to countries where the political functions of cronyism are narrower.
The chapter is concerned with the future of state–business relations (SBRs) in the MENA region, and about the potential for private sector growth. Can the new environment of heightened popular demands and lower oil prices encourage the political regimes in place to improve their efforts at boosting economic growth, even at the political risk of tolerating a larger private sector? The chapter outlines four types of relatively successful SBRs models that have taken hold in the MENA region in the recent past, and asks if particular models can be replicated in the rest of the region. It outlines how the intensity of social movements, and the ways the state reacts to them, influences the formation of SBRs. The main conclusion is that for many regimes, there seem to be only bad options to choose from, ushering an age of dilemma with uncertain choices and prospects.
This chapter argues that cronyism is a key component of a broader system of insider–outsider divisions in Arab political economies that also extends to labor markets. While economic dualism and insider privileges exist all over the developing world, the division is particularly deep and rigid in Arab countries. It results from a legacy of deep state involvement in the Arab economies under which states’ ambitions have increasingly outstripped their resources. Scarce resources have led to a de facto restriction of material privileges to insider groups, abetted by a legacy of deep bureaucratic intervention that lends itself to the creation of regulatory rents. Insider protection results in low levels of cooperation and trust between state, business, and workers, and creates an equilibrium of low skills and low productivity that hampers private-driven growth in the region. This argument is developed mostly on the basis of descriptive, cross-country data.
After being among the earliest countries to embark on the East Asian path, Pakistan fell away but was still among the ten fastest growing economies of the world during 1960–90. However, the seeds for the subsequent economic and technological malaise were also sown in that period. This paper provides an overview of recent theoretical and empirical work on industrial policies – more accurately labeled learning, industrial and technology (LIT) policies – and examines their implications for Pakistan. These include a selective, more sharply focused approach than the comprehensive agendas of reforms that have become common. Substantial islands of success with industrial policies have emerged in a variety of institutional and governance settings, different from those of the original East Asian developmental states. They offer valuable lessons. Raising the abysmally low level of investment in Pakistan is a requirement as well as an outcome and an instrument of industrial policies. This argues for a revival of development finance to stimulate investment as well as to direct it towards selective targets. How to mitigate the risks of this and other instruments of industrial policy to get the risk–reward ratio right is another concern of the paper. An important target of such policies should be the technological upgrading of existing industries. There is enormous scope for doing so, with international comparisons suggesting that Pakistani manufacturing does poorly – both in terms of variance in productivity between firms within an industry as well as in introducing new technologies and products. Whilst the constraints of the politics–governance–security/terrorism nexus are beyond the scope of the paper, their salience cannot be underestimated.
This study examines how accumulation of experience and knowledge by wind farm developers and turbine manufacturers contributed to productivity gains in China's wind power industry during its rapid expansion phase between 2005 and 2012. A learning curve analysis is conducted on an original dataset of 312 Chinese wind farms under the Clean Development Mechanism. A key strength of the dataset is that it includes data on actual, wind-farm level power generation. The analysis, based on third-party verified data, reveals that the experience and knowledge accumulation did not result in improvements in generation performance, turbine size, or unit turbine costs of Chinese wind farms. Rather, generation performance was driven by capital investments (i.e., larger and more expensive wind farms performed better). Turbine cost reductions were achieved by intense price competition which hampered investments in technology improvement and quality assurance. The Chinese wind power case demonstrates how market expansion, in the absence of carefully designed innovation policies that complement deployment policies, does not necessarily lead to technological learning. Fostering the technological capability of local industry can take a long time. When scale-up happens quickly, it is crucial to develop and refine local technological capability.
What do border guards and central bankers have in common? Both operate, on a day-today basis, in political spaces exempt from many of the norms of liberal democratic politics, and yet have the power to define and constrain them. In order to understand the role of such routine suspensions in the norms of liberal politics, we need to move beyond analyses that focus narrowly on security exceptionalism or emergency-management and pay attention to the practices of technocratic exceptionalism. Drawing on Foucault's lectures on biopolitics, I examine the ways in which economic theory and practice has sought to resolve some of the central tensions in liberalism by protecting the market from too much democracy-a kind of exceptionalism exemplified by the doctrine of central bank independence.
Note: This is a pre-publication version of an article forthcoming in the journal International Political Sociology.
The 1990s have witnessed the ascendance of a new orthodoxy which asserts that democracy and development are mutually reinforcing. This is in marked contrast to the dominant consensus that held sway for the previous two decades, which stated that developmental progress in poor societies was best assured by strong states, ruled by authoritarian regimes. Today, however, many new democracies are illiberal, non-participatory, and characterized by enormous inequalities. Developmental democracy cannot therefore be regarded as an assured outcome of a simultaneous process of economic and political liberalization. The central inquiry of this important new study concerns the extent to which it is possible to strive towards a new form of developmental state that can promote broad-based and equitable development in the context of legitimized, inclusive democracy. The argument running through this book is that there is scope for continuous political intervention in the design of democratic institutions that shape the context of state-led development initiatives. Institutional arrangements which foster political participation, the dispersion of political power, and increased representation by women and other disadvantaged groups can make democratic regimes more sensitive to issues of poverty, social welfare, and gender discrimination through remedial action and policy commitments. Oxford Studies in Demcratization is a series for scholars and students of comparative politics and related disciplines. Volumes will concentrate on the comparative study of the democratization processes that accompanied the decline and termination of the cold war. The geographical focus of the series will primarily be Latin America, the Caribbean, Southern and Eastern Europe, and relevant experiences in Africa and Asia. The Series Editor is Laurence Whitehead.
O artigo apresenta uma discussão sobre a trajetória política recente do Brasil. Para isso, apresentam-se as transições desde o impeachment contra a presidenta Rousseff até a vitória eleitoral de Jair Bolsonaro. A análise se centra nas caraterísticas dos diferentes momentos políticos, em particular, na agenda de políticas públicas. A natureza das transições está explicada com base no jogo das elites políticas e econômicas. O artigo recupera também elementos positivos que poderiam, potencialmente, gerar um contraponto à ideologia reacionária dos movimentos no poder desde o golpe parlamentar de 2016.
Over the last 40 years, China’s development has been breath-taking. Its poor, centrally planned economy has been transformed into a middle-income capitalist one with a strong resemblance to highly successful East Asian economies like Taiwan and South Korea. It is argued here that China had become a developmental state by the mid-1990s, showing most features of its predecessors. At the same time, differences such as its huge size, socialist past, and structural problems have made it increasingly clear that China’s rapid growth rate is unsustainable. Instead of a strong and confident great power, one can only see a vulnerable giant with an inevitably decelerating economy.
Historical development patterns are uneven. There are windows of opportunity for countries on the periphery to catch-up, others may lose momentum. Using the Maddison database accelerating and decelerating periods can be found. This paper compares the development trends of six East-Central European (ECE) countries with the average of highly developed countries, and three successfully catching-up countries. A methodological novelty of the paper is the usage of enveloping curves. The approach is based of Ferenc Jánossy’s seminal work on the long-term development trendlines of countries, which are interpreted as historic growth potential indicators. ECE growth performance is also compared to their own long-term potentials. The development pattern is interpreted in the mainstream political concepts of the various historical epochs. The analysis concludes that ECE region’s growth performance is more successful in state-permeated management of slack periods. Liberal epochs’ accelerated growth of highly developed countries could not be followed.
There is some consensus on the foreign policy of Dilma Rousseff’s government that Brazil lost prestige and international influence because of her lesser personal dedication. Against this consensus, the paper presents two alternative hypotheses for explaining its unsatisfactory outcomes: that there was no change in policy objectives but an adaptation to a more hostile context and that its limitations were structurally related to dependency on global corporations and to the increasing rejection of South-South politics by domestic business. If this analysis is correct, the structural limitations described require that the struggle to achieve an independent foreign policy involve deeper political and ideological battles and a more radical questioning of neoliberal capitalism.
Há certo consenso sobre a política econômica externa do governo Dilma Rousseff: o Brasil perdeu prestígio e influência internacional por causa de sua menor dedicação pessoal. Contra este consenso, o artigo apresenta duas hipóteses para explicar os resultados piores: que não houve mudança nos objetivos da política, mas sua adaptação a contexto mais hostil, e que os limites da política externa relacionam-se, estruturalmente, à dependência das corporações globais e, politicamente, à gradual rejeição da política Sul-Sul por parte do empresariado interno. Se esta análise estiver correta, a existência dos limites estruturais apontados exige que, no futuro, a luta para assegurar uma política externa independente envolva batalhas políticas e ideológicas mais profundas e um questionamento mais radical do capitalismo neoliberal.
This book systematically analyzes the economic dynamics of large emerging economies from an extended Comparative Capitalisms perspective. Coining the phrase ‘state-permeated capitalism’, the authors shift the focus of research from economic policy alone, towards the real world of corporate and state behavior.
On the basis of four empirical case studies (Brazil, India, China, South Africa), the main drivers for robust economic growth in these countries from the 2000s until the 2010s are revealed. These are found, in particular, in mutual institutional compatibilities of ‘state-permeated capitalism’, in their large domestic markets, and beneficial global economic constellations. Differences in their institutional arrangements are explored to explain why China and India have been more economically successful than Brazil and South Africa. The authors highlight substantial challenges for the stability of state-permeated capitalism and assess the potential future growth, sustainability and likely pitfalls for these large emerging economies.
Opening further avenues for empirical and theoretical research, this book raises questions for the future of the global economic order and should appeal to academics, graduate students and advanced undergraduates in politics, economics, economic sociology and development studies. It should also prove a worthwhile and provocative read for development practitioners and policy-makers.
Due to copyright restrictions I cannot provide the full text of the book. For more information see
https://www.routledge.com/State-permeated-Capitalism-in-Large-Emerging-Economies-1st-Edition/Nolke-ten-Brink-May-Claar/p/book/9780429261145
What are the institutional and political foundations of trade policy? Is such politics of policy still relevant in the age of liberalization when trade tariffs have fallen in prominence? To answer these questions, this chapter sheds light on the politics of partial liberalization using the strategic trade policy shift induced by the European Union’s trade agreements with Egypt and Morocco that resulted in an across-the-board reduction in tariffs and was followed by a wave of non-tariff measures in the decade of the 2000s. Using fine-grained data on the presence of politically connected businesses across different manufacturing sub-sectors, the chapter demonstrates that politically connected sectors received disproportionately higher levels of non-tariff protection in the wake of the EU-induced tariff liberalizations. The bulk of these non-tariff measures were technical barriers to trade that require greater administrative oversight through bureaucratic inspections and conformity assessments, and are therefore susceptible to political abuse.
Capitalism has always been a global system, but not in fixed ways. Different national powers have emerged and become dominant over the centuries, but the fundamental processes underlying the uneven development of global capitalism have not altered; they continue to be driven by imperialism — the struggle of large capital over economic territory of various kinds. Since the late 1960s, only the East Asian region has shown notable increases in its share of global GDP, and for the last two decades this has been dominated by the rise of China. This is directly related to the ability of the Chinese state to control the economy and to implement heterodox policies with very high investment rates. However, the Chinese case is exceptional: few other developing countries have followed a trajectory anything like that of China. Meanwhile, internal inequalities have increased across the world, as the bargaining power of capital vis‐à‐vis labour has increased dramatically in every country. This reflects the changed form of 21st century imperialism, which relies increasingly on the international legal and regulatory architecture as fortified by various multilateral, plurilateral and bilateral agreements that establish the hegemony of global capital in different ways.
This volume broadens the scope of 'comparative capitalism' within the Varieties of Capitalism (VoC) tradition. It endorses the employment of multiple perspectives, including critical political economy, institutionalist systems of capitalism, structuralist-dependency scholarship and world-systems theory. The contributors deal with the theory of economic patriotism in a conceptual framework, as well as case studies regarding rent-seeking behaviour, the patronage state in Hungary and Poland, the conflict between national regulation and the European legal framework and the perspective of wage relations in the European institutional framework. The book concludes with the legacy of developmentalism and dirigisme in a core-periphery relation, based on the French state and a range of non-European cases including Iran, Brazil and Egypt.
Tamás Gerőcs is Research Fellow in the Institute of World Economics at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Hungary. His research field of interest is Eastern European semi-peripheries with a special regard for economic transformation in Hungary.
Miklós Szanyi is Professor at the University of Szeged and Director of the Institute of World Economics at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Hungary. He has carried out extensive research work in the field of East-Central European transition, the role of multinational companies in the restructuring of CEE economies, spatial concentration processes in the region and the political economy of the transition process.
This chapter demonstrates the worth of economic patriotism (EP), and its particular way of understanding the politics of market-making and the role of the state, for understanding the limits of control. EP reflects profound if not self-evident contradictions between international market integration and spatially limited political mandates. This is the root of a profound disjuncture between what kinds of promises these politicians articulate to their citizens about ‘control’ over economy and the much more complex realities of achieving economic governance under twenty-first-century complex economic interdependence. Contemporary politicians have a very naïve (mis-)conception of state/market interactions. They presume, or pretend, to their electorates that they can pull all the necessary levers of economic policy to exert control over the national economic future.
The chapter investigates recent experiments of the state-led development approach in Brazil and Egypt in the light of their most recent difficulties. The comparative study applies an institutional and political economy approach to highlight similarities and differences: Brazil’s pro-poor and inclusive development model evolving after the millennium is contrasted with the lack of pro-poor stance and inclusive approach in Egypt.
“This is an original account of two of the most important social trends today: rising income inequality and declining class mobility. Underlining the contemporary relevance of classical economics and sociology, the authors show how rent-seeking has created a new elite that threatens democracy and entrenches an upper middle class, where economic advantage is passed from one generation to the next. This is social science in the grand tradition — sweeping and urgent in its analysis and implications.” – Bruce Western, Professor of Sociology, Columbia University, USA
“The most important book on recent trends in socio-economic inequality since Piketty`s Capital in the 20th Century.” -- Karl Ulrich Mayer, Stanley B. Resor Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Professor, Institution for Social and Policy Studies, Yale University, USA; Director Emeritus, Max Planck Institute of Human Development, Germany
“Inequality is one of the biggest challenges of our time. This book provides an important addition to the debate, combining in an original way economic, sociological and historical analysis” – Gerard Roland, E. Morris Cox Professor of Economics and Professor of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley, USA
Mihályi and Szelényi provide a timely contribution to contemporary debates about inequality of incomes and wealth, offering a careful examination of various sources of rent in contemporary societies, and considering several policy options to reduce inequality in order to preserve the meritocratic nature of liberal democracies.
While Rent Seekers, Profits, Wages and Rents acknowledges the rapid and disturbing increase of incomes and wealth in the top 1 or 0.1%, it focuses on the increasing rent component of incomes and wealth in the top 20% as even more consequential. The attention to cutting-edge issues on inequality in macroeconomics, political science and sociology will appeal to social scientists interested in income distribution and wealth accumulation.
Describes the rapid economic growth of the Republic of Korea since World War Two, which is seen as an example of "late industrialisation', achieved most successfully by Japan, but also occurring to some extent in Brazil, India, Mexico and Turkey. The author assesses the process of industrialisation, education, and technology transfer, and demonstrates the ability of the Korean economy to repay borrowed capital as a result of rapid productivity increases, thereby avoiding the debt problems of many other developing nations. Finally, future economic challenges are considered, with the conclusion that late industrialising countries cannot sustain their position in the long term, due to threats of new technological innovations from more advanced economies, and of lower wage costs from less advanced economies. -P.Hardiman
Over the last decade, large scale investments in hydraulic infrastructural projects are a cornerstone of the current Ethiopian government’s strategy of state building through hydro-energy modernization. This study, seeks to understand how does making of the EPRDF’s “developmental state” takes material form through the practices of dam building and with what effects by taking the Gibe III hydropower project as a case study. To this end, drawing on fieldwork in this project, the paper makes a detailed analysis of the State’s concrete practices and materiality in making this dam project. Our analysis points at contradictory processes regarding the materialization of the “developmental state” in the Omo Valley. On the one hand the central government increases its capacity of resource control and extraction in this periphery as “developmental state effects” and the garnering of legitimacy through delivering the dam [“development”] -at least at the national scale. On the other hand increasingly an authoritarian form it takes in this process and its failure to recognize the affected peoples’ claims seemingly jeopardizes its political legitimacy.
The concept of the developmental state emerged to explain the rapid growth of a number of countries in East Asia in the postwar period. Yet the developmental state literature also offered a theoretical approach to growth that was heterodox with respect to prevailing approaches in both economics and political science. Arguing for the distinctive features of developmental states, its proponents emphasized the role of government intervention and industrial policy as well as the significance of strong states and particular social coalitions. This literature blossomed into a wider approach, firmly planted in a much longer heterodox tradition. Comparative analysis explored the East Asian developmental states to countries that were decidedly not developmentalist, thus contributing to our historical understanding of long-run growth. This Element provides a critical but sympathetic overview of this literature and ends with its revival and a look forward at the possibilities for developmentalist approaches, in both the advanced industrial states and developing world.
When do states forge technological change in mature industries? This article challenges the emphasis on bureaucratic autonomy in explaining the ability of governments to promote technological change. We show that structural features of the bureaucracy alone are insufficient to account for variation in policy intervention, and argue that sectoral patterns of interest intermediation shape state capacity. Political coordination leads industry and government to broker technological transformations in consensus-driven negotiations. This prioritizes the interests of incumbent firms, likely resulting in regulatory capture and weak policy intervention. Political competition among interest groups and state agencies, by contrast, allows policy-makers to organize coalitions of technology challengers, likely leading to strong policy intervention. We examine this argument in the case of electric vehicle policy in Germany and the United States. Germany failed to disrupt its auto sector to transition to electric vehicles, while the United States adopted comprehensive policies for the manufacturing and commercialization of electric cars against incumbent opposition. Counter to conventional wisdom, our findings suggest that states can effectively engage in sectoral intervention to drive technological change in the absence of autonomous bureaucracies.
To date, challenges to renewable energy transition have been discussed largely based on the cases and experiences from the Global North. In this paper, we aim at broadening our understanding of this specific socio-technical transition by incorporating the case of wind power development in China. Based on the analysis of policy and legal documents, we examine how institutions are organized and incentives are distributed among relevant stakeholders. We argue that China’s significant wind curtailment problem has been produced and exacerbated by multiple axes of institutional misalignments stemming from China’s fragmented energy bureaucracy. Through the study of the Chinese approach to renewable energy transition, our goal is to demonstrate the institutional plurality of socio-technical transition and the context specificity of its challenges.
The European Union (EU) is at the forefront of engaging in external trade relations outside of the World Trade Organization (WTO) with entire regions and economic powerhouses. Understanding why and how the EU engages in one of the most active fields of external relations is crucial.
This book fills a gap in the literature by analysing motives on the modes – bilateralism, inter-regionalism, or multilateralism - of EU external trade relations towards regional organizations in Asia and Latin America outside of the WTO. In particular, it examines why the EU turned from interregional to bilateral external trade relations towards these world regions – a question that is, to date, under-researched. By developing and testing an original approach rooted in realist theorizing coined ‘commercial realism’, it examines systematically the explanatory power of commercial realism against liberal-institutionalist approaches dominant in the literature on EU external relations through five in-depth case studies.