CIAO DATE: 01/2012
October 2011
The New School Graduate Program in International Affairs
As many authors have argued, the state has played a central role in capitalist development, both in developing and developed countries. The question is why have some states been more successful than others in promoting economic development? In this paper I propose a theoretical agenda to investigate the factors that have made some states more successful than others. I suggest that a complex set of historical, sociological, and political factors shape state formation and a country's international competitiveness; further international competitiveness itself shapes the ability to foster economic development. I argue that these factors determine the ways in which states and economies co-evolve. Additionally, since countries are embedded in a global system, an investigation of this co-evolution requires a very different theory of industrial organization and thus of international competition. Thus the state confronts a constrained autonomy in being able to obtain taxation revenue and foreign exchange so as to finance important developmental needs. Finally I conclude that the rationale for “bringing the state back in” has to not only critically examine the notion of “state failure” but also has to reject the notion of “market failure”.
Resource link: Constrained Autonomy and the Developmental State: From Successful Developmentalism to Catastrophic Failure [PDF] - 508K