From UNDP, "Human Development Report 2013"
Drivers of Development Transformation
Driver 1: a proactive developmental state
Driver 2: tapping of global markets
Driver 3: determined social policy innovation
How have so many countries in the South transformed their human development prospects? Given their social and political
diversity and their contrasting natural resource endowments, their trajectories have often diverged. Yet some underlying
themes have been consistent. This chapter looks at the experience of some of the more successful countries and at three
of their common drivers: their proactive developmental states, their capacity to tap into global markets and their focus on
social policy innovation.
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From UNECA -
Economic Report on Africa 2011. Governing development in Africa - the role of the
state in economic transformation
Chapter 4: The Role of the State in Economic Transformation in Africa
4.1 Economic transformation and sustained economic growth
- Stylized facts
- Growth and transformation in Africa
- Key lessons
4.2 The role of the state in promoting economic transformation in Africa
- Planning the development process
- Formulating relevant development policies
- Implementing plans and policies
4.3 Conclusions
References
Notes
Africa’s states have three major development tasks for achieving economic transformation:
planning the process, formulating appropriate policies and implementing the plans and policies.
The development process has to be planned for several reasons. The changes required are substantial
and therefore the decisions cannot be optimally made by free market forces—most developing
economies are characterized by pervasive market failures. The interdependence of all elements
of the process needs to be reconciled through comprehensive development frameworks
rather than narrow, partial models.
Economic Report on Africa. The complete series
Copyright © Economic Commission for Africa
|
From ECLAC 2012
Time for Equity: closing gaps, opening trails
(2 July 2012) "Planning for development is back with a renewed
strength and complex challenges," said today the Deputy Executive Secretary of ECLAC Antonio
Prado, when opening the commemorative seminar to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the
Latin American and Caribbean Institute for Economic and Social Planning (ILPES) at
the organization's headquarters in Santiago, Chile.
"Closing the multiple gaps
in the region takes a long-term vision, strategic planning and long-lasting persistence,
" highlighted Prado at the international seminar that will conclude tomorrow.
"The State must be capable of providing strategic management for the long run,
looking ahead, and being involved in the design of strategies for guiding national
development," he emphasized.
The Feasibility of the Democratic Developmental State in the South.
Edited by Daniel A. Omoweh. Dakar, CODESRIA, 2012, 180 p., ISBN: 978-2-86978-512-0
The state has a role to play in any economy, especially in the provision of public goods.
But the majority of the states in the South lack the capacity to perform such a minimal task.
This is partly because the concept of state capacity has not been well articulated and understood
in both scholarly and policy circles; nor has the politically-created process that will result
in the transformation of the statefrom an ‘incapable’ state into a ‘capable’ one been underway.
|
From UNCTAD, Least Development Countries Report 2009
Chapter
1
Rethinking the Role of
the State in LDCs - Towards Development Governance
The current financial crisis has given added
urgency to a reconsideration of the potential for new roles and
functions for the State in the current global context. This chapter
examines what this might mean in general terms for the least developed
countries (LDCs). Its central argument is that the LDCs should pursue
good development governance and that with this in view they should
seek to build developmental State capabilities.
Development governance, or governance for development, is about
creating a better future for members of a society by using the
authority of the State to promote economic development, and in
particular to catalyze structural transformation, create productive
employment opportunities and raise living standards for present and
future generations. In general terms, governance is about the
processes of interaction between the Government — the formal
institutions of the State including the executive, legislature,
bureaucracy, judiciary and police — and society. Development
governance is governance that is oriented to solve common national
development problems, create new national development opportunities
and achieve common national development goals. This is not simply a
matter of designing appropriate institutions but also a question of
policies and the processes through which they are formulated and
implemented. Which institutions matter is inseparable from what
policies are adopted. Development governance is thus about the
processes, policies and institutions that are associated with
purposefully promoting national development and ensuring a socially
legitimate and inclusive distribution of its costs and benefits.
|
From
UNCTAD
Economic Development in Africa 2007
Reclaiming Policy Space
Domestic Resource Mobilization and Developmental States
"Developmental states" are the key to boosting domestic savings and
productive investments in Africa, contends Economic Development in
Africa 2007
|
Latin American
Politics and Society - Summer
2001
State developmentalism without a developmental state: The
public foundations of the "free market miracle" in Chile
By Kurtz, Marcus
If export orientation is a goal in a sustainable development strategy,
this study argues that public interventions at the sectoral level in a
variety of markets can produce economic reorientation that pursues
international comparative advantage faster and at lower cost than free
market forces can. Pervasive failures in information, credit, input,
distribution, and insurance markets can render strictly market-based
adjustment both slow and costly. Although Chile's export boom and high
growth rates have been associated with its free market economic
policies, this article, based on a comparison of the fruit, fish, and
forestry sectors, contends that new forms of public intervention were
crucial catalysts in shaping a sustained export response.
|
Thandika
Mkandawire - 1998
Thinking About Developmental
States in Africa
One remarkable feature of the discourse on the state and development in
Africa is the disjuncture between an analytical tradition that insists
on the impossibility of developmental states in Africa and a
prescriptive literature that presupposes their existence. States whose
capacity to pursue any national project is denied at one level
(theoretical or diagnostic) are exhorted, at the prescriptive level, to
assume roles that are, ex definicione, beyond their capacity or
political will. Such states are urged to "delink", to reduce
themselves, to stabilize the economy, to privatize the economy, to
engage in "good governance", to democratize themselves and society, to
create an "enabling environment" for the private sector, etc.
In other words, to do what they cannot do. What we then have is, to
paraphrase Gramci, the pessimism of the diagnosis and the optimism of
the prescription. Obviously such a contradictory position is
unsatisfactory. To attain some congruence between diagnosis and
prescription, we need to retrace our steps back to the diagnosis. We
shall argue that neither Africa’s post-colonial history nor the actual
practice engaged in by successful "developmental states" rules out the
possibility of African "developmental states" capable of playing a more
dynamic role than hitherto. |
On
the 1990s East Asian Crisis and the developmental state debate
Mark Beeson - 2004
The rise and fall (?) of the
developmental state: the vicissitudes and implications of East Asian
interventionism
"... but it is important
to emphasise that one of the most important consequences of the crisis
was to subject
the entire East Asian development experience to a rapid and generally
unfavourable
reappraisal. The distinctive role of the region’s interventionist
political elites was the
object of particular attention as what were formerly seen as ‘strong’
states were now
depicted as centres of self-serving ‘crony capitalism’. This remarkable
change in the
conventional wisdom about East Asian modes of governance was mirrored
in, and
drove, an externally imposed reform agenda - designed by primarily by
the
International Monetary Fund with encouragement from the United States -
which was
intended to completely reconfigure much that was distinctive about East
Asian
developmental states.
The key questions that emerged as a consequence of the crisis
and its subsequent economic and political aftermath were: was the East
Asian
developmental state (DS) actually the cause of the crisis? Can it
survive in the face of
external reformist pressure in particular and in the face of
competitive pressures
generated by ‘globalisation’ more generally?
|
From International Development Research Center - Canada
BRICS -The role of the state
Mario Scerri and Helena M. M. Lastres
Routledge/ 2013-03-01
ISBN: 9780415842549/ 390 pg.
e-ISBN:
Download
EBook Download
PDF Order
Book
This is the first volume in a series of five books bringing together the results
of intensive research on the national systems of innovation in the BRICS
countries – Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. The Role of the
State analyzes the relationship between the state and the development of the
national system of innovation. Combining original data and expert analysis, the
book presents experience and knowledge that may impact how we understand the
theory of innovation systems, and implement policies and strategies for their
development.
...
|
A.
K. Bagchi - 2000
The past and future of the
developmental state
Like most human institutions—the family, the village, the city, the
state,
customs, laws, the nation—the developmental state was born long
before anybody thought of naming it. There are debates about when it
was
born, whether all developmental states (as they are usually
characterized)
are properly labeled, and whether there have been developmental states
overlooked literature. In this paper, it will be claimed, inter alia,
that indeed
there were developmental states long before economists, political
scientists
or historians recognized them as such, and that not all developmental
states,
as conventionally labeled, have been true members of the select club of
developmental states. |
From Third World Quarterly
L. Boer (1997)
Feature Review: The State in a Changing World
|
Two Africas? Two Ugandas? An African
"Democratic Developmental State"?
Or another "failed" state?
By T. M. Shaw - 2004
…neither Africa's post-colonial history nor the actual practice engaged
in by successful 'developmental states' rule out the possibility of
African 'developmental states' capable of playing a more dynamic role
than hitherto (Mkandawire 2002: 289)
…the spread of the term ‘global civil society’ reflects an underlying
social reality. What we can observe in the 1990s is the emergence of a
supranational sphere of social & political participation in which
citizen groups, social movements, and individuals engage in dialogue
with each other & with various governmental actors – international,
national & local – as well as the business world…global civil
society both feeds on & reacts to globalization (Anheier, Glasius
& Kaldor 2001: 4 & 7)
|
Economic development and
the anatomy of crisis
in Africa: from colonialism through structural adjustment
By H. Stein - 2000
Africa is mired in a developmental crisis, not the common narrow
monetary or financial crisis
portrayed in the standard literature but a crisis of a more profound
and protracted nature.
A developmental crisis refers to the generalized incapacity of an
economy to generate
the conditions necessary for a sustained improvement in the standard of
living.
The problem is basically structural in nature. The antecedents lay in
the colonial period
and in the inability of post-colonial governments to fundamentally
transform the economies
inherited at independence. While structural adjustment has exacerbated
the underlying
weaknesses of African economies, its greatest crime is located in its
inherent inability to
structurally and institutionally transform African economies. The major
reason can be
found in its roots that lie in neo-classical economic theory with its
misplaced emphasis on
balancing financial variables in a hypothetical axiomatic world.
Adjustment is simply incapable
of either assessing the nature of Africa’s problems or putting in place
the policies that
will put African countries on a trajectory of sustainable development.
1
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Botswana's "Developmental
State" and politics
of legitimacy
By I. Taylor - 2002
|
A democratic developmental state in Africa? A
concept paper
By O. Edigheji - 2005
...the question of the democratic developmental state is not
sufficiently on the agenda in Africa. It has also received little
attention in academic
discourse. Against this background, the Centre for Policy Studies
(CPS), Johannesburg, South
Africa and the Partners in Development for Research, Consulting and
Training (PID), Cairo,
Egypt are undertaking a research project on the democratic
developmental state in Africa. It
will address the following pertinent issues:
• Can African states be both democratic and developmental under
conditions of
globalisation?
• What are the indicators and mechanisms for democratic
developmentalism?
• What are the prerequisites for the establishment of democratic
developmental
states and do these prerequisites exist in Africa?
• What are the prospects of introducing such democratic
developmentalism under the
present conditions of globalisation?
|
The developmental state,
democracy and glocal society in Africa
By D. W. Nabudere - 2006
|
Sub-Saharan
Africa
Financing the
developmental state: tax and revenues issues
By A. Sindzingre - 2006
This paper focuses on the concept of the developmental state, the
conditions of its consolidation, especially in the perspective of the
modes of financing it requires. The issues of taxation, public revenue
and spending, are examined, because they constitute crucial elements in
the building of viable developmental states, and are problematic in
least developed countries, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa. The
concept of the developmental state stems from the analysis of
fast-growing Asian economies. Its elements are presented, particularly
the fact that they rely on low levels of taxation and public spending,
at least at the early stages of their development. The principal
elements and constraints regarding taxation in Sub-Saharan Africa are
then analysed, in particular its dependence on commodities and external
trade, as well as the effects of the programmes of international
financial institutions, in particular trade liberalisation, which
appear to be mixed. The constraints that affect aid in the building of
developmental taxation systems and states are also examined. Aid
provides incentives that may undermine tax structures and key state
institutions of recipient countries, such as policy credibility and
political legitimacy. Firstly, it is shown that the key features of
developmental states are the capacity for a state to credibly commit
and intervene, more under the form of policies that are directed
towards growth than taxation policies. These states relied on a series
of ingredients: intervention of the state in the economy via credible
policies oriented towards growth, capacity to address coordination
failures and to reallocate factors of production, coalitions between
the state, private firms and the civil society. These ingredients
cannot be disentangled from political dimensions, growth having being
instrumental in the building of legitimacy. Secondly, it is argued that
for a policy or an institution to be effective, it needs to be credible
and result from endogenous processes. These conditions for
developmental states and institutions are currently to be built in most
Sub-Saharan African countries. The difficult question remains as to
whether foreign aid, given the intrinsic asymmetry of conditionalities,
aid dependence and budget constraints, can contribute to the building
of developmental states and policies that could be credibly committed
towards growth.
|
Growing out of the
developmental state:
East Asia welfare reform in the 1990s (draft)
By I. Peng and J. Wong - 2004
|
The developmental state and
educative advance in East Asia
By M. Abe - 2004
|
Private tutoring and demand
for education
in South Korea
By S. Kim and Ju-Ho Lee - 2004
|
The managerial
revolution and the developmental state:
the case of U.S. agriculture
By L. Ferleger and W. Lazonick - 1993
|
Overarching
Concerns Programme Paper Number 9 October 2005
United
Nations Research Institute for Social Development
The Search for Policy
Autonomy in the South: Universalism, Social Learning and the Role of
Regionalism
By Norman Girvan
This paper argues the need for the South to secure greater autonomy in
development policy... It utilizes a political economy analysis in the
historical context of decolonization and contemporary globalization...
in the 1950s, the new subdiscipline of development economics made a
significant contribution to policy autonomy in the global South by
legitimizing the principle that their economies should be understood
within their own terms and by providing justification for policies that
built up its industrial capabilities...However, the marginalization of
development economics and its policies in the 1980s resulted in a
marked discontinuity in the accumulation of policy experience in much
of the South and the squandering of much of intellectual capital
developed in the earlier period. Neoclassical economics and neoliberal
policies ruled out the notion of an economics sui generis for the
developing countries. Nonetheless, developments since the late 1990s
have shown that the triumphalism was premature, as global social
movements, financial crises, contradictions in the World Trade
Organization (WTO) process and the shifting political climate in the
South have served to undermine the Washington consensus and have
re-opened space for academic enquiry and policy experimentation in the
South and North.
--------------------- |
The Developmental Agenda in the
Age of Neoliberal Globalization
By E. Yeldan -
2001
Draft paper prepared for the discussion at the UNRISD meeting on
“The Need to Rethink Development Economics”,
7-8 September 2001,
Cape Town, South Africa.
“Is this the end of economic developmental state?” was the opening
title of a modeling exercise by Adelman and Yeldan in the Global
Trade Policy Analysis meetings of Odense, June 1999. Referring to
the recent Asian crisis as a point of reference, the authors utilized a
smooth-functioning neoclassical model with fully flexible commodity and
financial markets to show how the neoliberal global agenda severely
restricts the autonomy of the developing countries to pursue strategic
policies to attain development targets. Accordingly, with the recent
attempts towards full liberalization of the capital account under
pressures from the US and the IMF (the so-called Washington consensus),
governments lost their autonomy in designing a strategic mix of the
exchange rate and interest rate instruments for promotion of
industrialization targets. Thus, in Grabel’s words:
“These changes, coupled with the ensuing investor euphoria, led to a
general speculative appreciation of asset prices, extremely high real
interest rates, and an overall shift in aggregate economic activity
toward financial trading and away from industrial activities” (Grabel
1995: 128).
The assessment that the process of neoliberal globalization is
associated with successive financial crises has further been a
recurrent theme in much of the literature on international finance and
open economy macroeconomics. Notwithstanding the original proposition
of a (Tobin’s) tax on short term capital flows, the detrimental effects
of unregulated flows of financial capital have been the topic of active
debate in Stiglitz (2000), Rodrik (1997), Calvo, Leiderman and Reinhart
(1996), Grabel (1996), Diaz-Alejandro (1985), and Velasco (1987); and
also constituted one of the main themes in all of the last five annual Trade
and Development Reports of UNCTAD.
In this paper, I attempt to address to the ideas provided in this
literature and try to deduce implications for a renewed development
policy. |
The Need to Rethink Development
Economics
By T. Mkandawire
- 2001
Draft paper prepared for the discussion at the UNRISD meeting on
“The Need to Rethink Development Economics”,
7-8 September 2001,
Cape Town, South Africa.
Up until the 1970s, problems of welfare and unemployment in the
developed countries, and those of poverty and underdevelopment in the
developing ones, were interpreted through the lenses of the corpus of
knowledge recognized as Keynesian economics and “development economics”
respectively. But the oil crisis, “stagflation” and subsequent
indebtedness of the developing countries severely put to test the
models and the theories that had underpinned their welfare and
development policies.
>Although there was little in common between the actual analytical
content of Keynesian doctrine and that of development economics, the
two approaches shared critical views of neoclassical economic theory,
and the related acceptance of state intervention. They also had in
common the understanding that the economy described by neoclassical
economists was a “special case”, and there were many other economies
that could be “stylized” by entirely different models because they were
characterized by different structural features. Furthermore, they
shared the view that the state could play an important role in
addressing these structural features, which often resulted in “market
failures”. Both were induced by the need to solve policy problems and
were not merely formal theoretical disciplines whose modelling was
based on “real economies” trapped in a particular equilibrium
(unemployment or underdevelopment) from which they had to be
extricated. These positions opened them to attack from neoliberalism.
For two decades, starting from the beginning of the mid-1970s, the
status of development economics in both academia and policy circles was
not enviable. The “death” of development economics was not merely an
academic “paradigm shift”. It was given official sanction by the United
States government. The US representative to the Asian Development Bank
is reported (Newsweek 13th May, 1985) to have announced that the
“United States completely rejects the idea that there is such a thing
as ‘development economics’” (cited in Toye, John 1987: page 73).
Development economics became, as John Toye remarks, “an Orwellian
un-thing” in the eyes of the most powerful nation. The Spartan
certainty of the ascendant neoliberalism as to what was required left
no room for specialized knowledge of the problems of development. |
The Neo-Liberal Doctrine and the
African Crisis
By M. Nissanke -
2001
Draft paper prepared for the discussion at the UNRISD meeting on
“The Need to Rethink Development Economics”,
7-8 September 2001,
Cape Town, South Africa.
The core model of Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) undoubtedly
reflects a revival of neo-liberal orthodoxy in mainstream economics as
well as in popular global economic policy debates in the 1980s. In this
sense, SAPs are an application of the neo-conservatism of the
Thatcher-Reagan era to development economics- a product of the
neo-liberal ’counter-revolution’. The legitimacy of ’development
economics’ as a distinct subject discipline was seriously challenged in
the process.
The ascendancy of the neo-liberal school in development economics has
not only impoverished the development policy debate with its monolithic
understanding of the essentially multi-dimensional process of
socio-economic development, but also inflicted irrecoverable costs and
pains to low-income countries by imposing its doctrine in the form of
conditionality to Structural Adjustment Loans. While its supremacy as
applied to developed and emerging market economies has been gradually
questioned after a series of global financial crises in the 1990s, its
application to low income developing countries has been surviving as
the core component of loan conditionality.
|
The "Washington Consensus" and
Development Economics
By M. Weisbrot -
2001
Draft paper prepared for the discussion at the UNRISD meeting on
“The Need to Rethink Development Economics”,
7-8 September 2001,
Cape Town, South Africa.
The disappearance of development economics, and replacement of economic
development strategy with a simple code for liberalizing international
trade and capital flows, has undoubtedly contributed to the economic
failure experienced by the vast majority of low to middle income
countries over the last two decades. Thandika Mkandawire and others
have summarized some of the analytical capacity and tools that were
lost in this neo-classical and neo-liberal resurgence. In many ways it
is similar to the loss of knowledge in the natural sciences due to
clerical influence during the Middle Ages; so it is a great thing that
the UNRISD has taken up this project not only to recover lost knowledge
but to lay the foundation for real progress in both practice and
theory. |
Thoughts and Proposals on
Reviving Development Economics
By J. Y. Lim -
2001
Draft paper prepared for the discussion at the UNRISD meeting on
“The Need to Rethink Development Economics”,
7-8 September 2001,
Cape Town, South Africa.
There are three main factors that caused the decline of development
economics, especially during the eighties and nineties. These reasons
are:
1.
the hegemony of the neoclassical non-interventionist and
monetarist/rational expectations schools in mainstream economics during
the seventies and eighties succeeded in removing from the mainstream
literature developmental and interventionist approaches to economics.
2. The core of development economic theories and the dependency
theorists’ debates on the dual economy, works on ‘big push’, ‘balanced
and unbalanced growth’ and ‘import-substitution strategy’
all did not employ the ‘elegant’ ‘rational’, optimizing and comparative
statics framework and methodology of neoclassical economics... The
methodology mattered, but we must remember that the historical
conditions that brought about the rise of the endogenous growth models
in the eighties and nineties precisely involved the lack of empirical
validity of the traditional neoclassical growth model, especially with
the rise of the East Asian ‘miracles’. (They had to turn to the
disgraced theories of development economics to partly find the right
answer.) Another point is that the ascendancy and dominance now of new
Keynesian and new institutional theories that allow ‘market failures’,
institutions and governance structures to enter the mainstream is their
use of neoclassical models and tools as well as the increasingly
fashionable game theory approach.
3. A third reason which we should not ignore is the entry in the
sixties and seventies of so many other topics in the realm of
development economics, which merely duplicated existing fields in
economics but applying them in a ‘Third World’ context. Areas and
topics in the fiscal, monetary, exchange rate arenas, labor economics,
international trade, agricultural economics, education and social
sector (population, health, etc.) were all included as part of
‘development economics’. This...relegated development economics to a
status of ‘soft’ economics indistinguishable from sociology, psychology
and other social sciences, and unbefitting of true ‘hard-core’
scientific and analytical (neoclassical) economics. |
Towards Developmental Democracy:
A Note
By A. Olukoshi -
2001
Draft paper prepared for the discussion at the UNRISD meeting on
“The Need to Rethink Development Economics”,
7-8 September 2001,
Cape Town, South Africa.
The policies that were at the heart of the structural adjustment
programmes were presented as the core of a new "consensus" on the
management of the economy to which no (viable) alternative exists; in
fact, they were more reflective of the hegemonic influence exercised by
the key Western regimes and the multilateral financial/economic
institutions which they control. These governments and institutions
served as the springboard for the spread of neo-liberal policies around
the world, using an array of conditionality and cross-conditionality
clauses to compel developing countries to embrace their preferred
options for the reform of ailing national economies.
Yet, as has been acknowledged even by the World Bank, structural
adjustment has generally failed to achieve the results which its
authors promised it would deliver. (It bears pointing out though that
even with the repeated acknowledgement by the Bank about the
shortcomings of its policy prescriptions, orthodox structural
adjustment measures continue to be administered on developing countries
as the panacea to their economic difficulties).
Amidst the on-going discussions about the limitations of the
neo-liberal philosophical and policy underpinnings of IMF/World Bank
structural adjustment, and against the backdrop of the serious concerns
which have been raised, both before and since the recent East Asian
crisis,...various alternatives to neo-liberalism are beginning
seriously to be considered. At the heart of some of these alternatives
is a concern to bring development back into the mainstream of economic
and social policy-making. This note is intended to contribute to this
discussion by suggesting that the quest, which is highly welcomed, for
a new developmentalism should be imbued with and undertaken in a
framework that is by definition democratic. It will draw on the
specific African experience for this purpose. |
Publications
Women, Politics and a
Development Economics Renaissance
By R. R. Sharma -
2001
Draft paper prepared for the discussion at the UNRISD meeting on
“The Need to Rethink Development Economics”,
7-8 September 2001,
Cape Town, South Africa.
"I come to this discourse from the perspective of an advocate, a
lobbyist to be more precise, working to open the minds of U.S. policy
makers to alternative thinking on development, including the role of
gender in development.
"I think there are roughly four steps required to mainstream a new
development economics theory and policy—empirical research, theory
formulation and testing, education of technical experts in the use of
new theory, and the ultimate adoption of the new theory by policy
decision makers. Of these four steps, Women’s EDGE focuses its work on
the last: to get U.S. policy makers to abandon the “Washington
Consensus” and embrace a new formula for development, one which
includes gender in its basic equation. Therefore, I will focus my
contribution on how we might “close the loop” between researchers,
economists, and decision-makers.
"And, as you have already gathered from the name of my organization, I
will offer some thoughts on how the neo-liberal model has affected
women and why any new thinking on development economics must ground
itself in the most basic social organization humans have—male and
female." |
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Editor: Róbinson Rojas Sandford
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