The Post-Crisis Developmental State Perspectives from the Global Periphery: Perspectives from the Global Periphery
Abstract
This book assembles some of the most exciting contributions to the field of comparative capitalism studies. The book is a must-read for all scholars that strive to be up-to date in the debate on the developmental state.
--Andreas Nolke is Professor of Political Science at the Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany
This volume extends the earlier “developmental state” literature into the present, and the earlier world-system concept of the semi-periphery into present-day debates about institutions, path dependency, middle-income trap, and authoritarianism. Written from the perspective of the Global East and South, it reads like a breath of fresh air for those of us schooled in the Western narrative of development and modernization.
--Robert H. Wade is Professor of Political Economy and Development at the LSE, UK
The focus of this volume is on the role of the developmental state in a situation in which a series of major crises affects the (semi-) periphery of the global economy. The authors go beyond the established debate on developmental states in East Asia by highlighting a much broader understanding of development and a very different global economic context. They also further the existing debate by covering new country cases. At the same time, they deepen our perspective on developmental states by looking at unusual sectors such as green industrial policy, education and farming.
Gerőcs, Tamás is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic and Regional Studies, Institute of World Economics and SUNY Binghamton, United States.
Ricz, Judit is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic and Regional Studies, Institute of World Economics and Associate Professor at the Department of World Economy, Corvinus University of Budapest, Hungary.
... In other words, there is growing evidence that the more recent waves of globalization, underpinned by the rising application of ICT in manufacturing, have been strengthening the agency of smaller economic actors from peripheral economies by allowing them to make better use of the global networked economy to upgrade their production and innovation capabilities. Moreover, the economics literature on CEE is also seeing this increasingly important role of smaller, dispersed economies from around the world in the global economy as an important post-2008 developmental opportunity for the region (Gerőcs and Ricz, 2021). Since CESEE countries are already some of the most globally integrated economies, it seems pivotal to enquire whether and how these global production trends have already affected the composition of their exports and heterogeneity of their economic actors. ...
Political economy scholarship on Eastern European countries identifies their export-led growth models as dependent on foreign direct investors (FDI). This paper argues that small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are another important cohort of exporters for at least some of these countries. We attribute the success of exporting SMEs to the rise of new technologies and production processes, which have allowed economic agents from peripheral countries to engage with global value chains and international business-to-business trade directly, rather than via FDI. We empirically draw on an in-depth case study of Serbia, combining macroeconomic analysis and 145 interviews with exporting SMEs. The country made a notable switch from consumption- to export-led growth in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis, despite lagging in FDI attraction. To address this puzzle, we show that internationalization of SMEs became an additional driver of the country’s exports. Then examining how these exporters have internationalized, we find that firm co-location is not a main source of knowledge exchange for them. Instead, they emphasize the importance of drawing upon translocal sources of knowledge exchange for international competitiveness. Using SME owners’ networks abroad, immigration experiences, clients from online platforms, and contacts from outsourcing opportunities has provided them with the knowledge needed to become innovative, and to repurpose the old socialist industrial resources they had at their disposal. Since exporting SMEs and their multi-level agency is an empirically under-researched phenomenon in the region, future studies on peripheral export-led growth models should explore economic and political implications of this growth coalition further.
The 2008 financial crisis allowed for the rising power of China to expand deeper into more (semi-)peripheral regions: in the past decade, the role of China and Chinese SOEs has increased markedly in Eastern Europe. This has been in step with China's geopolitical and geoeconomic expansion, hallmarked by the Belt and Road Initiative; the reconstruction of the Belgrade-Budapest railway line constitutes one of its flagship projects in Europe. This paper aims to explore the complexities of the current reconfiguration of state-capital nexus through an empirical analysis of this particular development project; in doing so, we hope to contribute to the scholarly debate about the heuristic use of ‘new’ state capitalism in three specific ways. First, instead of conceptualizing the state as a territorially confined power container, we propose to scrutinize the state-capital nexus from a multi-scalar and relational perspective. Second, we claim that the study of funding, financing and governing of large-scale infrastructural investments is a fruitful analytical entry point to theorize the changing relations between ‘state’ and ‘capital’. Finally, we argue that from the perspective of contemporary shifts in global power structures, the emergence of state capitalist modalities in the Eastern peripheries of Europe should be understood as a ‘co-production’ of the geopolitical rivalry and elite capture of domains of infrastructure. In terms of methodology, in order to show how state-capital relations are produced, enacted and redrawn, the study builds on the analysis of media sources, policy documents, company networks, semi-structured interviews, and non-participant observations.
Over the past half century, the spectacular economic development of Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan has been based to a large extent on particularly successful educational development. In the framework of the developmental state, education planning has been an integral part of economic planning in all three countries. Reforms of the education system have been deeply integrated, both in terms of content and structure, into the sectoral changes in the economy. At the same time, the essentially Anglo-Saxon education systems followed recent global pedagogical trends, especially in the timely development of mathematics and science education. The development of education has created the human conditions for the establishment of knowledge-based economies and will certainly contribute for further development.
Institutional economics attributes outstanding importance to the quality of market institutions in enhancing the economic performance of countries. Among many factors the existence of rents also exercises an important impact. If rents are of significant magnitude like in the case of resource-rich countries they usually stimulate economic agents to concentrate on securing the future expropriation of the rent source. Instead of engaging in burdensome market competition it is easier to secure the rentier position and income be it scarcity, regulatory, or geopolitical rent. This fact entangles serious moral hazards, especially if the rentier position is granted by governments. The collusion of business and polity over the rent sources can thwart the development of the institutions of the competition state. In this paper we compare a classic rentier state Iran and Hungary, another emerging market economy from East-Central Europe, from the viewpoint of retrograde institutional development impacts of rents. The comparison proved the pervasive impact of rents, especially in the case of large-scale concentrated rent sources like Iranian oil reserves. The negative institutional impacts were more limited in Hungary, mainly because of the smaller scale of the rent sources and the still existing control institutions’ activity. Iran suffered from repeated growth collapses, but also Hungary seemed to be endangered by entering the middle-income trap.
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.
Thirty years ago, the concept of “economic populism” was an original approach to understand the failed development trajectories of Latin America. At the heart of that research programme was the analytical description of the boom-and-bust cycles and the main elements of the adopted economic policy package that favoured income redistribution along with structural changes in the economy. Contemporary populism has become a worldwide phenomenon. By now, however, populist policies can hardly be judged as irresponsible; yet, certain distinct characteristics can still be identified. One field where populists have been rather active is developmentalism. Whereas scholarly work has been vigorously studying the demand side of populism, no such determined interest can be experienced with regard to the supply side, i.e., what populists actually do in power. The chapter addresses this challenge by comparing the most recent experiences of populists in power to the original elements of the populist developmental package.
This chapter systematically engages with similarities and differences of semi-peripheral economies’ alternative developmental paths and explores new perspectives on global dependencies in the context of changing hegemonic relations. The chapter argues that the reformulated concept of state capitalism must be analysed in the framework of uneven and combined development that allows a better understanding of historical and global interconnectedness and helps avoid a narrow state-centric approach. For that purpose, the chapter offers a possible reconfiguration of the state’s epistemology with some new insights into the character, prospect and varieties of semi-peripheral development in the Global East and South. The author stresses the importance of the emergence of illiberal authoritarian regimes with mixed economic structures as a peculiar institutional feature in the semi-periphery since the global financial crisis. As a conclusion it aims to provide guidance for a renewed international political economy approach in analysing state capitalist tendencies.
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.
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.
RESUMO O artigo procura entender o governo Dilma Rousseff e o Golpe de 2016 levando em consideração o poder estrutural do capital financeiro e as contradições inerentes aos modelos de crescimento econômico e coalizão política observados desde o governo Lula. Argumenta-se que o projeto econômico do governo Rousseff procurava superar algumas destas contradições. O governo, contudo, não foi capaz de realizar nem as reformas institucionais nem as repactuações políticas necessárias para o sucesso de seu projeto, em contexto de desaceleração cíclica e aguçamento da concorrência internacional e dos conflitos sociais no Brasil. A política econômica é avaliada desde a austeridade de 2011 até a de 2015, passando pela chamada Nova Matriz Econômica e seu desmonte gradual em 2013. Analisa-se as origens da unificação da burguesia em torno a um programa neoliberal em 2016, assim como a relação entre a revolta das camadas médias e o ataque político-judicial resultante no Golpe de 2016.
Emerging economies have recently faced commodity price declines that reinforce the instability of natural resources as a basis for socio-economic transformation. This has re-energised arguments for industrialisation as necessary for such transitions. Drawing upon classical development economics theory, this paper offers a deployment of an enhanced developmental state paradigm (DSP) that highlights the roles of agriculture and mineral resources in the pursuit of industrial progress. This application of the DSP has its basis in narratives on Asian developmental states, with a focus on mineral resource endowment. Employed with reference to Africa’s key emerging economy and net petroleum exporter, Nigeria, the DSP shows how the state, influenced by significant milieus, has enabled linkages between oil and agriculture that can drive industrial transformation. The paper finds that linkages between oil and agriculture are well established; however, economic, social and political influences on the state have engendered agriculture’s limited onward contribution to structural change.
This concise account of Taiwan's history makes a cogent, compelling argument for the right of the Taiwanese people to declare their nation independent, if they so choose. Davison's bold stand—unprecedented from a Western author—challenges the one China notion advanced in the Shanghai Communique of 1972 and states unequivocally that, should independence be proclaimed, it could only be taken away by force if the international community sides with contemporary might over historical right. He argues that the possible conflict could be sufficiently incendiary to induce a major military clash between the United States, the People's Republic of China, and other major powers.
Davison lets the facts of Taiwanese history make the case for Taiwan's existence as a unique national entity. A historical overview details the circumstances under which the Qing dynasty made its 17th century claim on the island, the events that led to cession to Japan in 1895, the origins of the Guomindang occupation during the Chinese Civil War, and the dramatic election of March 2000 that brought the Democratic Progressive Party's Chen Shuibian to office, ending Guomindang domination. After centuries of outsider domination, and over a hundred years of disconnection from any government exercising power over all of mainland China, the Taiwanese people are in a position to make a decision for national independence based on solid historical evidence.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
‘In this eloquently written book, Arlo Poletti and Daniela Sicurelli assess rival explanations for the European Union’s trade policy towards small and developing trading partners. Through careful cross-case comparison, they uncover how and why the motives of policy-makers, business groups and NGOs make high normative aspirations diverge from actual negotiation outcomes.’
— Dirk De Bièvre, University of Antwerp, Belgium
This book critically engages with a long tradition of scholarly work that conceives of the European Union as a peculiar international actor that pursues a value-based, normatively oriented and development-friendly agenda in its relations with its international partners. The EU is a pivotal player in international trade relations, holding formidable power in trade but also exercising substantial power through trade. Trade policy therefore represents a strategic field for the EU to shape its image as a healthy economy and a global power. In this field, the EU has declared a twofold ambitious goal, namely that of fostering economic growth in Europe while, at the same time, promoting development and growth abroad, both in developed and developing countries. In other words, the EU aims to increase its competitiveness in world trade while acting as an ethical and normative power. Here, Poletti and Sicurelli explore the tension between these two roles.
Arlo Poletti is Associate Professor of International Political Economy at University of Trento, Italy.
Daniela Sicurelli is Associate Professor of International Relations at University of Trento, Italy.
Before the 1980s, the mainstream Western prescription for developing countries to catch up with the West assigned the state a leading role in governing the market. In the 1980s, this shifted to a framework-providing role in a largely deregulated and maximally open economy. Also in the 1980s, it became apparent that some East Asian capitalist economies were growing so fast that they would become ‘developed’ in the foreseeable future, marking them out as completely exceptional. Mainstream economists explained their success as the result of following the Western prescription, while other scholars attributed this rapid growth to ‘the developmental state’. This essay compares these two explanations of successful economic development, concluding in favour of the latter — with respect to the catch-up decades. But what happened subsequently? Several scholars who accept the key role of the developmental state in the early period of fast industrialization in East Asia now argue that South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore have transformed from developmental to close-to-neoliberal states. This contribution argues that the erstwhile East Asian developmental states have indeed changed, but they have not transformed into neoliberal states. Rather they have adapted and evolved, but still undertake market-steering, ‘societal mission’ roles well beyond neoliberal limits. The essay also suggests how other developing countries can learn lessons from their experience.
Teff (Eragrostis tef) is a major staple grain of Ethiopia, where the crop was domesticated from 4000 to 1000 BC. The high food-value Teff flour is basically used for preparing injera—a spongy pancake, the major component of the Ethiopian national dish. Due to its gluten-free quality and high mineral content, the popularity of TeffTeff has been increasing in the western world. Very little is known, about the households that produce and consume Teff in Ethiopia. Using information from more than 9000 households collected by the World Bank and the Central Statistical Agency-Ethiopia in 2011–2012 and 2013–2014, and applying econometric estimation approaches, this study reveals that Teff is mainly produced by uneducated, male-headed rural households which have access to relatively more land and more family labor. In contrast, a higher proportion of Teff is consumed by urban households and those headed by an older, educated head. Based on the findings, this study asserts that the productivity of Teff should be enhanced by developing and disseminating high-yielding varieties as Teff consumption has been increasing in general and, secondly, the resource-poor Teff cultivators should be linked with the global value chain which may bring extra benefits to them in Ethiopia; however, the loss of domestic consumers’ surplus should also be considered economically. [EconLit citations : C24, C25, D12, D13, Q12, Q13].
In 2000, China agreed to share with African countries its experience in the field of investment promotion relating to the establishment and management of special economic zones. The Eastern Industry Zone was subsequently established. Of the various zones being built in Africa, Ethiopia's perhaps represents one of the biggest challenges to both the Chinese developers and the host government alike. Utilising insights from evolutionary economic geography and the work of Albert Hirschman, this article seeks to analyse the progress thus far in the Ethiopian SEZ. Spatially discrete, unfocused in terms of clustering and with few linkages to the wider economy, what impact, if any, the development of this zone will have on Ethiopia's structural transformation is discussed. The implications for Ethiopia's wider investment in industrial parks as part of its developmental state project is also drawn out.
Accelerating innovation is as important as climate policy
This paper argues that to understand the relevance of developmental states in East Asia and elsewhere, we need to focus on the changing development agenda in the early twenty-first century, especially how this connects with the global challenge of climate change and thereby sustainable, low-carbon development. It combines theories on state capacity and ecological modernisation to form the ‘new developmentalism’ concept. This is applied to study revitalised and refocused forms of state capacity aimed at realising the transformative economic objectives associated with sustainable development. New developmentalism helps us understand not only current state capacity practice in a climate challenged world but also how we have moved beyond original conceptions of developmental statism. It may be understood in the wider context of the sustainable development agenda and climate interventionism. As is argued, new developmentalism is most clearly evident in East Asia but can be applied in a wider geographic sense where strong forms of developmental state capacity are exercised towards meeting transformative sustainable development goals.