Revisiting the developmental state 1: Introduction

Matt Bishop - Associate Fellow, SPERI and Senior Lecturer in International Politics, University of Sheffield

Tony Payne - Professorial Fellow, SPERI, University of Sheffield

Moreover, this is just the tip of the iceberg: numerous other excellent academic books have been written on the developmental state in recent years (see here, here and here).  What explains this resurgence of interest?   Partly it relates to the way that the growing number of cases of apparently successful developmental statism has continued to provide fertile ground for analysis.

Again, even on this blog, many of us have sought to apply this idea to countries as diverse as Rwanda (which is growing rapidly) and even supposedly ‘developed’ countries like the UK, which look increasingly to be in need of a substantial dose of developmentalism.  Perhaps most important is the United States itself: the bastion of free-market rhetoric has actually always intervened substantially more than is widely realised precisely because, as Linda Weiss has put it, ‘it has a state whose risk appetite is enormous, extraordinary and enduring’ (emphasis added).

Yet, if the concept of the developmental state has been so well covered, why are we seeking to revisit it in this blog series?  There are at least four broad reasons why it is worth thinking about developmental states afresh.

First, it is not clear that the idea travels as easily as we might think across time and space.  The original developmental states of East Asia (Japan and the ‘Tigers’ of Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan) were in many ways unique, and they all developed rapidly together in a particular geopolitical climate, and often with huge amounts of US aid.  They were different to the early developers, and also different to those that have come since.  That the label is now applied – whether loosely or tightly – to a vast array of countries as diverse as Indonesia, Brazil, Mozambique, Mauritius and Botswana (amongst many others) suggests that it may have lost a degree of comparative analytical purchase.  Moreover, it is not clear whether any country, let alone all countries, can replicate the kinds of transformations that occurred in East Asia in the 1970s in the contemporary era of global-value-chain-driven globalisation.

Second, and consequently, we wonder whether there may be an excessive degree of conceptual stretching occurring today.  In a wonderful review article in 1991 Ziya Öniş outlined clearly the key elements of a developmental state.  These included, but were not limited to: a singular focus on productivity growth and industrial upgrading; a highly penetrating central state apparatus (and even potentially intrinsic authoritarianism); market-distorting interventions to protect strategic industries; export-led growth; and an insulated and developmentally-minded bureaucracy.  This latter point, especially, is crucial: as Öniş noted at the time, the whims of politicians were necessarily to be subordinated to highly capable technocrats: ‘politicians “reign” while the bureaucrats “rule” [and] the objective of the political elite is to legitimize the actions of the elite bureaucratic agencies’.  It is not, therefore, sufficient just to identify the combination of high levels of growth and state intervention: these two things do not, of themselves, render a state truly ‘developmental’.

Third, these states are actually not that novel, and they have always been with us.  As Ha-Joon Chang reminded us a few years ago in Kicking Away the Ladder (probably the most-read contemporary book on university political economy of development courses), even the Western countries that claimed to have developed via open markets did precisely the opposite.  Britain, the United States, Germany, France and others were highly developmental – and arguably remain so in certain respects and to differing extents – suggesting that the process of development always embodies in practice, even if not in theory or ideology, a complex mix of state-market interactions.  It may be implausible in reality to draw a simple binary distinction between ‘neoliberalism’ and ‘developmentalism’ as so many have done, for example, in contrasting the West with China.  Neoliberal deepening was itself a state-led process, just as developmentalism relies on market mechanisms. Countries can and do exhibit characteristics of both simultaneously.

Fourth, a whole host of other thorny questions still haunt the developmental state landscape.  Does globalisation inherently make economically nationalist policy more difficult?  Are strong states always desirable or developmental, and where does one find a developmentally-minded bureaucracy that is able to operate at arms-length from political actors?  Can very poor countries really build the necessary institutions to transcend a historically-constituted dependence on, say, extractive industries?  Is it plausible to allow countries great leeway to engage simultaneously in mercantilist policy while trying at the same time to maintain a relatively open global economy?  Can we tolerate the fact that developmentalism seems to require, at best, repression and, at worst, outright authoritarianism?  Is everything still rosy in the first-generation developmental states or do we now gloss over the developmental challenges facing them?  What actually distinguishes a genuinely developmental state and do the many countries to which such a label is assigned really fit the bill?  Who, if anyone, is responsible for driving developmental plans forward today, and do they all have to operate at the national state level?

Successive contributors to this blog series will pick up some at least of these many themes in the posts that will follow at weekly intervals over the next few weeks.