While state involvement is blamed for stagnation and economic disarray in most regions of the Third World, it has become fashionable in the last ten years to give the East Asian state credit for playing a positive economic role. Amsden (1979) argued that Taiwan was not the model market economy portrayed by its American advisors nor the exemplar of dependence portrayed by its detractors, but a successful case of etatisme. Even observers with a neoclassical bent(e.g. Jones and Sakong, 1980) recognized the central role of the state in Korea's rapid industrialization. Increasingly, these states were labeled "developmental states" and held up as models to be emulated by other aspiring Third World nations.
The ruling Ethiopia People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) in its notable second reform appraisal held in the aftermath of the 2005 national election concluded that the utmost priority of the government should be realizing fastest and sustainable economic growth that fairly benefits its citizens' unless the very existence of the country wouldn't be guaranteed. Given the history of poverty reduction in developing countries, particularly in Africa, EPRDF realized that it is unthinkable to eradicate poverty from Ethiopia adopting neo-liberalism. Above all, the miraculous economic transformation of the South East Asian countries like South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong has proved that there is another way to development, not just neo-liberalism. Accordingly, EPRDF, after examining South Korea's and Taiwan's history of economic development in particular where both countries have had a large section of rural population unlike Hong Kong and Singapore where both are urban, found 'developmental state' relevant to Ethiopia. However, unlike these countries which were originally under non-democratic regimes where their leaders fear the rural peasant and external aggression from their communist rivals, EPRDF has had a great support of rural and urban population with no imminent foreign threat(s), and decided to execute the ideology rather under the umbrella of democracy. Therefore, employing secondary sources, this desk study aims to analyze whether Ethiopia is a 'democratic developmental state?' And, concludes that given the practices of the government vis-a-vis the principles of democracy and developmental state, Ethiopia couldn't be taken as best model for democratic developmental state, rather emerging developmental state.
This essay revisits an earlier article, published in 2008, that argued that the United States had created a "hidden developmental state" that helped move technologies from the laboratory to the marketplace. In the intervening fifteen years, this apparatus has become more elaborate with ever more government initiatives at the federal, state, and local levels. Moreover, the major pieces of legislation passed in the first two years of the Biden administration have added considerable new funding. Nevertheless, this set of programs has not yet become a part of political debates outside of the federal government. It remains hidden to most of the electorate.
The uniqueness of Taiwan's industrialization is that small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) had been the major contributors to exports. What has been responsible for the success of the SMEs? How far and in what ways did the state contribute to their success: can it be attributed to the government's industrial policy? The statist account of Taiwan's development, a dominant approach to explain its economic growth, is weak in answering these questions. This article argues that the existence of a unique industrial structure was key in the explanation of Taiwan's SME-led exports. The industrial structure was basically a consequence of the state's political strategies that determined its public policy towards the private sector. It argues that the market rather than industrial policy was the explanation of the industrial success of SMEs; the economic bureaucracy was a world of politics rather than a range of monolithic institutions; and strongman tactics rather than institutions were the source of state steering capacity and were responsible for the success of industrial policy. It concludes that Taiwan's development was a "politically inspired industrial success" rather than a state-led development.
The paper subjects grand theories to critical appreciation and argues that the state played a central role in transforming the Cypriot economy which is characterised as a small economy heavily dependent on export industries such as textiles and tourism. The relationship between the Cypriot 'economic miracle' and globalisation is investigated in the light of the experience of the export-led textile industry suffering from the consequences of American destabilisation of the Libyan economy—historically Cyprus' major export market.
Abstract This paper proposes a new approach to the classification of Developmental States (DS) based on their public efforts to foster human development. We conceptualize DS within a multidimensional framework that includes three main dimensions (economic, social and democratic), and run a hierarchical cluster analysis for 112 countries in order to build a multidimensional taxonomy of ds. We propose a country-classification and characterize three country-groups with different developmental public efforts: i) the human development States; ii) the unbalanced developmental States and iii) the non-developmental States. Our multidimensional taxonomy offers a more complex understanding of the variety of public efforts devoted to promote human development, thus overcoming the restricted -economical- conception of DS, which is mainly focused to the East Asian region.
