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, that explored comparisons with states 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 possibility for developmentalist approaches, both in the advanced and developing world.

Ian Pirie gives a comprehensive and up-to-date analysis of state and economic restructuring in South Korea since the 1997 crisis.

Developmental state, n.: the government, motivated by desire for economic advancement, intervenes in industrial affairs. The notion of the developmental state has come under attack in recent years. Critics charge that Japan's success in putting this notion into practice has not been replicated elsewhere, that the concept threatens the purity of freemarket economics, and that its shortcomings have led to financial turmoil in Asia. In this informative and thought-provoking book, a team of distinguished scholars revisits this notion to assess its continuing utility and establish a common vocabulary for debates on these issues. Drawing on new political and economic theories and emphasizing recent events, the authors examine the East Asian experience to show how the developmental state involves a combination of political, bureaucratic, and moneyed influences that shape economic life in the region. Taking as its point of departure Chalmers Johnson's account of the Japanese developmental state, the book explores the interplay of forces that have determined the structure of opportunity in the region. The authors critically address the argument for centralized political involvement in industrial development (with a new contribution by Johnson), describe the historical impact of colonialism and the Cold War, consider new ideas in economics, and compare the experiences of East Asian countries with those of France, Brazil, Mexico, and India.

ATSEA: Owen reserve.

This book explores the emergence of a new developmental state in Latin America and its significance for law and development theory. In Brazil since 2000, emerging forms of state activism, including a new industrial policy and a robust social policy, differ from both classic developmental state and neoliberal approaches. They favor a strong state and a strong market, employ public-private partnerships, seek to reduce inequality, and embrace the global economy. Case studies of state activism and law in Brazil show new roles emerging for legal institutions. They describe how the national development bank uses law in innovation promotion, trade law strengthens new developmental policies in export promotion and public health, and social law frames innovative poverty-relief programs that reduce inequality and stimulate demand. Contrasting Brazilian experience with Colombia and Mexico, the book underscores the unique features of Brazil's trajectory and the importance of this experience for understanding the role of law in development today.

This book characterizes South Korea’s pre-neoliberal regime of social governance as developmental liberalism and analyzes the turbulent processes and complex outcomes of its neoliberal degeneration since the mid-1990s. Instead of repeating the politically charged critical view on South Korea’s failure in socially inclusionary and sustainable development, the author closely examines the systemic interfaces of the economic, political, and social constituents of its developmental transformation. South Korea has turned and remained developmentally liberal, rather than liberally liberal (like the United States), in its economic and sociopolitical configuration of social security, labor protection, population, education, and so forth. Initially conceived in the late 1980s, ironically along its democratic restoration, and radically accelerated during the national financial crisis in the late 1990s, South Korea’s neoliberal transition has become incomparably volatile and destructive, due crucially to its various distortive effects on the country’s developmental liberal order.

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.