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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 338.90091724
EAN num: 9780521545259
ISBN number: 0521545250
Label: Cambridge University Press
Manufacturer: Cambridge University Press
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 478
Printing Date: August 30, 2004
Publishing house: Cambridge University Press
Sale Popularity Level: 252543
Studio: Cambridge University Press
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Why have some developing countries industrialized and become more prosperous quickly while others have not? Focusing on South Korea, Brazil, India, and Nigeria, this study compares the characteristics of fairly functioning states and explains why states in some parts of the developing world are more effective. It emphasizes the role of colonialism in leaving behind more or less effective states, and the relationship of these states with business and labor in helping explain comparative sucess in promoting economic progress.
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[CONTENT]
In his book State-Directed Development, Atul Kohli, Professor at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University, asks the long-discussed and controversial question why some countries have succeeded in creating wealth and raising the standards of living of their citizens while other countries have failed despite extensive efforts.
To approach the question, Kohli presents four country cases in a comparative study - Korea, India, Brazil and Nigeria - providing extensive information on each country's colonial history, its class structures as well as the political and economic decisions that took place since their independence.
Kohli divides the wide array of developing countries into three ideal-type categories of states: cohesive-capitalist states, fragmented-multiclass states, and neopatrimonial states. He points out that none of the four samples in the study ever reflected any of those ideal-type categories (though some have come close to one or another), and, in addition, that states tended at different times with varying governments and regimes to different categories.
Cohesive-capitalist states represent, according to Kohli, nations with a strong, centralized government and are organized along a professional and meritocratic bureaucracy. The state in this example is insulated from any elite or popular interests, utilizes nationalism to mobilize support and to overcome fragmentation within the population, cooperates closely with businesses and investors, and intervenes heavily in the economy to enforce a rapid industrialization process. The nations that came closest to this description in Kohli's sample of case studies are Korea under Park Chung Hee and Brazil during the Vargas regime. On the other extreme of the scale, Kohli identifies neopatrimonial states, which are depicted as structurally weak states, taken hostage by a small cliqué of corrupt leaders whose only interest is personal aggrandizement. In a neepatrimonial state, corruption and rent-seeking is endemic, and leaders have no commitment to any public greater good. The nation that comes closest to this description among Kohli's sample is Nigeria for most of its post-colonial history. Finally, Kohli describes the fragmented-multiclass state, a state in which the population is fragmented along ethnic, tribal, class, religious or regional lines, but which is nonetheless ruled by a democratic regime. To maintain the ability for political action, the leaders of the latter state frequently furnish conflicting promises to different interest groups, while falling short on delivering them accordingly. Kohli sees the latter category relected in post-independence India.
While neopatrimonial states are likely to fail in creating growth and development for understandable reasons in an environment of endemic corruption and rent-seeking, Kohli argues that "[c]ohesive-capitalist states have proved to be the most effective agents of rapid industrialization in the global periphery" (p381). This is due to their ability to define and to enforce narrow economic goals, as well as to align all domestic resources and rally all classes - workers as well as capital-endowed elites - along a common economic agenda. The economic performance of fragmented-multiclass states, Kohli argues, end up somewhere between cohesive-capitalist and neopatrimonial states, with middling economic results due to recurrent swings in their political focus to accommodate changing pressures of conflicting interest groups.
Up to here, Kohli's concept of state categories does not exceedingly differ from Peter Evans's theory of developmental states which classifies states according to their ability to act as agents of societal transformation and growth. Kohli's neopatrimonial state equals Evans's predatory state, the fragmented-multiclass state is similar to Evans's intermediate state, and the cohesive-capitalist state seems to be comparable to Evans's developmental state. (Evans, "Embedded Autonomy," 1995) Kohli, however, distinguishes his understanding between the concept of the cohesive-capitalist state and Evans's development state as follows: "[P]olitical capacities are rooted not in the levels of information exchanged between state and business [as in Evans's developmental state] but in the amount of power the states command to extract resources, to define priority areas of expenditure, and to instill a sense of discipline and purpose in society." (385) The `discipline' Kohli refers to materializes in the "control of labor, downward penetration of state authority so as to silence opposition and control behavior, and nationalist mobilization so as to put a peacetime economy on a war-time footing." (p389) In describing Brazil's experience, Kohli becomes more explicit in outlining what it takes to be a cohesive-capitalist state: "systematic labor repression which generally kept wage gains well behind productivity ... Read More
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