Preface: Development in Asia after the Developmental State

Jarvis, Darryl S.L. and Toby Carroll (2017), ‘Disembedding Autonomy: Asia after the Developmental State,’ in Jarvis, Darryl S.L. and Toby Carroll (eds.), Asia after the Developmental State: Disembedding Autonomy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.3-50. DOI 10.1017/9781316480502.002

Asia After the Developmental State, 2017

A review of the origins and evolution of the developmental state in East Asia up to the present

Developmental States: Relevancy, Redundancy Or …, 2004

Scholars of development have learned a great deal about what economic institutions do, but much less about the origins of such arrangements. This article introduces and assesses a new political explanation for the origins of "devel-opmental states"—organizational complexes in which expert and coherent bureaucratic agencies collaborate with organized private sectors to spur national economic transformation. Conventional wisdom holds that developmental states in South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore result from "state autonomy," especially from popular pressures. We argue that these states' impressive capacities actually emerged from the challenges of delivering side payments to restive popular sectors under conditions of extreme geopolitical insecurity and severe resource constraints. Such an interactive condition of "systemic vulnerability" never confronted ruling elites in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, or Thailand—allowing them to uphold political coalitions, and hence to retain power, with much less ambitious state-building efforts. Scholars of economic development have become increasingly avid students of economic institutions. Studies abound on the norms, rules, and organizations that regulate and, to varying degrees, coordinate a society's productive activities. Few would now question Rodrik's conclusion that "the quality of institutions is key" for economic growth.' Yet our growing understanding of the economic impacts of these institutions has not been matched by our understanding of their political origins.^ In this arti-Authors listed alphabetically. We are grateful to the following for helpful comments:

This paper details the emergence and role of the 'Developmental State' in East Asia and assesses whether it is compatible with processes assocated with 'globalisation'. The paper argues that despite the fact that the power and authority of states generally has been undermined by globalisation, and more general governance problems in the region, much of Southeast Asia still needs an effective developmental state.

Narratives, Nations and Other World Products in the Making of Global History, 2024

As a concept, development denotes, at the very least, change over time along some kind of progression. Things move upwards and onwards, forwards and not back. As a historical process, the concept could be used as merely a descriptor of the changes in a particular society or relationship, to signify precisely that shift along some kind of agreed-upon metric. However, as with several such concepts, the notion of forward progression through set stages is itself a product of particular historical processes, and for this reason requires some disaggregation. For the purpose of this chapter, we will use ‘development’ to refer to an historical object: the idea and associated practices held by historical actors in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in their efforts to describe or compel the movement of societies through stages of progression. We will focus on how the concept emerged in colonial and postcolonial governance and was adopted idiosyncratically in two key sites. Through two related yet contrasting cases, that of the Siamese monarchy and Siam/ Thailand and the Dutch East Indies and independent Indonesia, we will show how the sites of ‘development’ as a concept and aim demonstrate continuities between semi-colonial/monarchical and postcolonial/democratic governance. Furthermore, rather than the practices of development moving unidirectionally from ‘the West’ outwards, we will show how the circulation of these practices mirrored the emergence of nationalism, internal colonization and twentieth-century geopolitics in a region that came to be known as Southeast Asia – partly because of these practices and their implementation.

Journal of East Asian Studies, 2004

2020

The potential for grave economic collapse at the close of the Second World War left the world in a desperate state. As countries searched for ways to revitalise their economies on both a national and global scale, doubts of the existing economic systems were widespread. Traditional capitalist practices had shown themselves to be repeatedly unsettled by deeply disruptive episodes of immense economic imbalance, demonstrated most profoundly by the Great Depression (Beeson 2007: 143). A leading illustration of how susceptible this period was to the introduction of an alternate approach is the Asian Development State. Termed by Chalmers Johnson, the guiding quality of this state model is an emphasis on governments that actively intervene in economic processes and control the course of development (Wade 1990). Commonly appreciated as the basis of the ‘East Asian Miracle’, the most significant result of this model was its unprecedented rapid development and economic growth (Page, 1994). Th...

2000