Taking a New Look at State-Directed Industrialization

Abstract

State-Directed Development: Political Power and Industrialization in the Global Periphery. By Atul Kohli. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 478 pp., $85.00 (ISBN: 0-521-83670-0), $27.99 paper (ISBN: 0-521-54525-0). The questions of “why some countries are rich and some others are poor” (North and Thomas 1973; Rosenberg and Birdzell 1986; Diamond 1999; Landes 1999) or “what it would take for less developed countries to break their vicious circle and join the club of the rich” (Corbo, Krueger, and Ossa 1985; De Soto 2000; Easterly 2001) have long occupied the minds of the students of development studies. However, a new generation of scholars, who are focusing on the comparative performance of less developed countries in order to explain why some developing countries have been more successful than others, has radically altered the terrain of development economics (see, for example, Bates 1981; Frieden 1991; Evans 1995; Waldner 1999). Atul Kohli's State-Directed Development: Political Power and Industrialization in the Global Periphery represents a stellar example of this new generation of scholarship. Although the book is entitled State-Directed Development , Kohli is mainly concerned with “industrialization” rather than “development.” Broadly speaking, Kohli takes the concept of “development” in its narrowest sense. He deliberately leaves out such issues as human development, the distribution of wealth, as well as the environmental and social concerns that usually accompany today's postmodern discussions of development (Sen 1999). Nonetheless, State-Directed Development explores a key puzzle in the study of late–late development, namely, why some developing nations have been more successful at facilitating industrialization than others. In search of an answer to this highly challenging question, Kohli openly allies himself …