Economic Backwardness In Historical Perspective Research Articles

A Discursive Dominance Theory of Economic Reform Sustainability: The Case of India

This article hypothesizes that economic reforms become sustainable when the discursive conditions prevailing in society tip against the existing paradigm under exceptional circumstances. Thus, unless the pro-liberalization constituencies dominate the development discourse, economic reforms, initiated under the exigencies of crisis and conditionalities, or carried out by a convinced executive with or without the stimulus of a crisis, will be reversed. The discursive conditions are determined based on eight factors: the dominant view of international intellectuals, illustrative country cases, executive orientations, political will, the degree and the perceived causes of economic crisis, attitudes on the part of donor agencies, and the perceived outcomes of economic reforms. The paper seeks to prove this “discursive dominance” hypothesis for the Indian case through a cross-temporal, comparative review of the evolution of economic policy in India over six different phases.

The Price of Success: Economic Sovietology, Development, and the Costs of Interdisciplinarity

In the 1940s and 1950s, as Soviet studies became a vibrant academic enterprise with significant links to the policy world, economic Sovietology occupied a special place. Those same years saw, also, the first major wave of decolonization and with it the rise of development economics. While many economists straddled both worlds, Harvard economic historian Alexander Gerschenkron occupied pride of place by virtue of his ideas, his reputation, and his students. Born in Odessa but with his economic education in Vienna, Gerschenkron brought to both enterprises a capacious and wide-ranging intellect and a determination to relate the economic history of his motherland to the contemporary problems of developing nations. His most famous essay, “Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective,” was an important attempt to draw lessons from the Russian economic experience and apply them to the industrializing world. He and his students had great intellectual success in plotting the connections between the second world's past and the third world's future, but with that success, ironically, came isolation from their colleagues both in economics departments and Soviet studies centers.

The Other Mirror: Grand Theory through the Lens of Latin America

This stimulating collection holds the history of Latin America up to variety of social theories, asking how regional specialists might apply these constructs, and how the latter might be modified in view of Latin American experience.Leading off part 1, “Creating an Economy,” Jeremy Adelman considers the new institutionalism, which studies how institutions—from law to informal practice—can reduce transactions costs, and which asserts that stable property rights are essential for economic progress. Adelman welcomes the growing Latin Americanist literature in this school, but faults new institutionalism for ignoring actors’ pretransaction bargaining power.Paul Gootenberg considers Alexander Gerschenkron’s Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective, which emphasized the substitutability of institutions in the development of European economies. Gerschenkron found an heir in Albert Hirschman, who stressed developmental sequencing, but not stages. Gootenberg treats several comparative historical studies, though I don’t recognize my own, since he sees as its “central point” a “transmission” of structuralism from Romania to Latin America, an interpretation I rejected (Crafting the Third World, 1996, p. 222).Steven Topik examines the work of Karl Polanyi, best known for The Great Transformation (1944), which argues that the creation of a world market was as fundamental to the creation of the modern economy as the contemporaneous industrial revolution. Polanyi believed the self-regulating market was a fiction, and would not have approved of neoliberalism, but his influence on Latin American studies has been minimal.Veronica Montecinos and John Markoff are more concerned with economic actors than ideas. They argue that in recent decades neoclassical economics has not only overwhelmed its rivals but that its Latin American practitioners have increasingly replaced lawyers in powerful political positions. The authors consider networks relevant to the success of “technopols,” including ties formed in U.S. graduate schools and international financial agencies.In part 2, “The State and Democracy,” Fernando López-Alves examines Charles Tilly’s hypothesis that the nation-state in early modern Europe was the result of the interaction of revolution and state-building, and considers how this approach might apply to Argentina and Uruguay. López-Alves sees Tilly’s military-based coercion as crucial in South American state formation during the last part of the nineteenth century.Alan Knight examines the modern Mexican state from a Marxist perspective. He considers the “relative autonomy” of the state from class interests—problematized by Friedrich Engels and developed by Nicos Poulantzas. Knight notes that such autonomy waxed and waned as governments responded to international trends in the capitalist economy, but suggests Mexico might also be examined in a Tillyan framework, in which the state primarily serves the interests of its functionaries.Jorge Dominguez treats the early work of Samuel Huntington. In Political Order in Changing Societies (1968), Huntington stressed weak institutionalization, particularly of party structures, as a major obstacle for developing polities, and later hypothesized that political development was a reversible process. Dominguez believes that writers on dependency and bureaucratic authoritarianism should have heeded Huntington’s message on political parties.Samuel Valenzuela reassesses Barrington Moore’s thesis for Chile, where Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy has been applied by U.S. political scientists. Valenzuela’s thorough knowledge of Chile’s suffrage history allows him to challenge the Moore-derived notion that the landed elite, as embodied in the Conservative Party, were antidemocratic. He shows that, in order to blunt secularization and gain a religious peasantry’s support, Conservatives championed universal male suffrage from 1874. Landowners did not derive their income primarily from agriculture, and therefore didn’t have to extract surplus from inquilinos, as Moore’s thesis would imply.Part 3, “Living and Belonging,” begins with Miguel Angel Centeno’s theoretical essay examining “socialized self-discipline,” universally associated with modernity, but usually judged to be feebly developed in Latin America. Centeno shows how discipline is instilled through four institutions: prisons, armies, factories, and schools. It is hard to understand why he excludes churches from his critical disciplinary institutions, since these were overarchingly important for Weber.Robert Levine writes about Michel de Certeau, a Jesuit linguist and social theorist. De Certeau studied “resistance in everyday life to structures of domination.” But since he wrote little about Latin America, Levine largely has to speculate how this French theorist would have regarded discourses of Latin American regimes.Claudio Lomnitz’s closing article considers Benedict Anderson’s theory of nationalism in Imagined Communities, and best illustrates the promise of the editors’ approach. Anderson defines nationalism as “a specific form of communitarianism . . . [shaped by] print capitalism and colonial statecraft,” and holds that nationalism arose in the colonial world and spread to Europe. In his critique, Lomnitz shows the historical ambiguities of nación, and believes “Spanishness” over four centuries alternately focused on religiosity, descent (“race”), and geographic range. Lomnitz uses the Mexican case to challenge a theory partly based on Latin American data.One wonders why Weber’s “sultanistic” regimes theory, developed by Juan Linz and Houchang Chehabi, wasn’t included, but this volume is nonetheless wonderful fare to serve in graduate seminars.

From the Editors: Paradoxes of Imperial Modernity

11 Ab Imperio, 4/2002 From the EDITORS PARADOXES OF IMPERIAL MODERNITY The current issue of Ab Imperio ends the annual program entitled “Russian Empire/USSR and Paradoxes of Modernization”. From the point of view of the orthodox 1940s – 1950s theory of modernization (as well as in the minds of many contemporary historians and social scientists) “modernization ” appears as a linear process of the emergence of modern institutions, such as rational bureaucracy, market economy, parliamentary democracy, etc. This usage, which describes social, political and economic processes using verifiable positive data of social sciences, has outlived itself. Essentially, scholars have approached the study of modernization without a theory of the latter, which led to some new questions postulated under the impact of the cultural and linguistic turn in historical studies. Anew conception of modernity, which in many senses emerged from the ambiguous and often traumatic experience of the 20th century, was gradually substituted for the traditional theory of modernization. While accepting the innovative character of social, political, cultural and economic processes of modern history, the concept of “modernity” turns into the subject of analysis the paradoxical nature of these processes. Thus, historians looked at the combination of liberal models of social organization with racism and orientalism, of the Enlightenment project of rationalization of state and society with totalitarianism and genocide, etc. 12 From the Editors, Paradoxes of Imperial Modernity Nevertheless, the concept of modernity, which took shape in the era of the “postmodern” and of the essayistic style of historical writing, could not turn into a new historical metanarrative. While partly replacing the old-fashioned theory of modernization, the new concept keeps intact our understanding of specific features of the modern period, in which we are still dealing with such questions as what is Enlightenment, how to handle the constantly increasing pace of historical time, how to control the future and how to comprehend pre-modern times, which were innocent of all these questions. In 2002 we attempted to problematize processes of modernization and the concept of modernity, approaching them in the context of research into imperial and national phenomena. We believe that we succeeded to demonstrate the significant explanatory potential of the two paradigms, which were treated by our authors in the broadest way possible: from the narrowly functionalist understanding to the global view, where modernization (and even plural “modernizations”!) appear as element(s) of the phenomenon of modernity, loading the latter concept with a universal quality (see AI 1/2002). While accepting necessity for the diversification of the historical narrative of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union through the inclusion of different regional and national histories and problematizing the existence of the “archaic” empire in the age of social, economic, cultural and political changes, we also attempted to show relevance of the paradigms of modernization and modernity (whose theorists rarely thought about these paradigms’ compatibility with the historical fact of multinational societies) for the study of such phenomena as ethnicity, nationhood and nation building, which in the East European region are firmly written within the context of empires and multinational states. Finally, in the last issue “Social and Economic Structures and Paradoxes of Imperial Modernization” we paid attention to the topic, which was central for the old modernization theory and its critics. As before, we were interested in the problem of the realization of some ideal historical scenario under specific conditions of the maximally heterogeneous social and economic space of empire. Thus, leaving aside the deterministic and teleological principles of the orthodox modernization theory, we do not want to leave aside the very idea of the vectored character of historical processes in modern Russia. We appeal for a more adequate perception of the spatial component of the imperial chronotop and of its multidimensional and nonlinear character. Considering the above mentioned, it should not appear peculiar that we open the issue with the first Russian language publication of Alexander Gerschenkron’s classic “Economic backwardness in historical perspective”, exactly half a century after the English original publication. This work by Gerschenkron, which appeared at the peak of popularity of the modernization theory and which had survived this theory’s decline, has always been deeper than it seemed to apologetic or...

German Banking and Japanese Banking: A Comparative Analysis

Wherever there are banks there are arguments about the macro-economic effects of banking policy. One of the best theoretical formulations of the effect of German banking on German development appears in Alexander Gerschenkron's “Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective” and “Reflections on the Concept of Prerequisites of Modern Industrialization.” This problem is given an empirical treatment in “German Banks and German Growth, 1883–1913: An Empirical View,” by Hugh Neuburger and Houston H. Stokes. Our intention in this paper is to test further our previous findings and to contrast our findings for Germany with those for post-World War II Japan. While the two situations are not entirely comparable they are similar enough to make such a comparison worthwhile.

German Banks and German Growth, 1883–1913: an Empirical View

Almost without exception interpretations of the remarkable growth of the German economy before the First World War stress the role of the German banking system, in general, and that of the universal or Kreditbank, in particular. The most subtle and penetrating view of this question is that developed in Alexander Gerschenkron's essays, “Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective” and “Prerequisites of Modern Industrialization.” According to this view, “backward” countries which experience successful industrializations do so by making institutional “substitutions” which enable them to compensate for or even to turn to their advantage their initial deficiencies of productive factors. The institution which is “substituted” in Germany to perform this function is the Kreditbank. This interpretation places special emphasis on the growth-inducing character of these banks, but is also open to the possibility that an industrialization led by such institutions might have entailed certain costs. In fact, Professor Gerschenkron explicitly invites help in assessing these costs in commenting: “it would be a fruitful undertaking in research to explore and perhaps to measure and compare the difficulties, the strains, and the cost which were involved in the various processes of substitution ….” Thanks to the work of Ekkehard Eistert, who has constructed a reliable set of statistics on the German banking system in this era, it is now possible to attempt such a “fruitful undertaking.” Making use of these data, an econometric model has been constructed to test the hypothesis that the manner in which the Kreditbanken allocated credit contributed to the growth of German non-agricultural output. Our findings strongly suggest that the credit allocation policy of these banks was inhibiting rather than stimulating the German economy in the period for which data are available and that previous interpretations are in need of serious revision. It appears that, in Gerschenkron's terms, the “cost” of bank-led industrialization was far greater than anyone has previously suggested.

The Gerschenkron Effect: A Re-Examination

I NDEX number has richness and complexity of a jungle and includes a number of unexplored spots. In spite of an extensive and high-quality literature, of accuracy of economic measurements is far from being fully explored. It is interesting that economists dealing with market-type systems usually turn their attention to theory of cost-of-living index numbers, whereas students of centrally planned systems are captivated by problem of measuring economic growth. quantity index numbers and nature of their biases have received special attention from a number of Sovietologists, including Nutter [9, 10, 11], Levine [7], Bergson [2], Morsteen [8], and [4, 5, 6]. These people were in agreement that series aggregated by means of preindustrialization weights grow considerably faster than series aggregated by later-day weights. Nutter [9], Levine [7], Morsteen [8], and Bergson [2] used production possibility curves to demonstrate theoretically fact that base-yearweighted quantity indexes tend to drift upwards.' Gerschenkron, using actual data (selected items of United States machinery output in different years), offered empirical evidence to support this position. In order to explain phenomenon, he formulated a hypothesis which is often called Effect. present paper will re-examine this proposition.2 provides an explanation of why a quantity index, in binary comparison of preand post-industrialization situations, weighted with base-year prices, can be expected to be biased upwards. A brief summary of this explanation is that, during process of industrialization, scarcity relations change in such a way that production of highly fabricated goods increases proportionately more than that of slightly fabricated goods; and, at same time, relative prices of highly fabricated goods decrease. These inversely correlated price and quantity movements create a drift upwards in baseyear-weighted quantity index, and extent of divergence from current-year-weighted index depends on these opposite movements. One formulation of this proposition in Gerschenkron's words [6, p. 48] -is the process of industrialization in field of machinery production may be regarded as consisting (1) in an increase within total machinery output of share of highly fabricated goods in terms of low fabricated goods and (2) in a concomitant decline in prices of highly fabricated goods in terms of low fabricated goods. . . . To use . . . [an example] it is tractors whose output at beginning of industrialization process is small in relation to that of sickles. In course of industrialization, output of tractors increases much faster than that of sickles, while price of tractors in terms of sickles declines. I Thus characteristic feature of Gerschenkron-type industrialization process is a negative coefficient of correlation between price and quantity relatives, which is responsible for 'This fact was also shown by use of isoquants by Yoram Barzel, Some Observations on Index Number Problem, Econometrica, XXX, July 1963; and same method was used for interpretation of aggregate output indexes in R. Morsteen and R. Powell, Capital Stock (Homewood, Ill.: Irwin, 1966), p. 5. 2 Gerschenkron Hypothesis and Gerschenkron Effect should be kept apart. former refers to development characteristics in initial period of industrialization in some European countries; it proposes that these can be explained better if reference is made to relative backwardness prior to great spurt. See: A. Gerschenkron, Backwardness in Historical Perspective, in Progress of Underdeveloped Areas, ed. by Bert F. Hoselitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), pp. 3-29; The Early Phases of Industrialization in Russia: Afterthoughts and Counterthoughts, in Economics of TakeOff into Sustained Growth, ed. by W. W. Rostow (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1963), pp. 151-169; The Discipline and I, Journal of Economic History, XXVII (Dec. 1967), pp. 443-459. present paper is concerned only with Effect, or with reasons for upward bias of base-year-weighted quantity index. 'Gerschenkron gives same explanation for index number bias in Chapter IX, Soviet Heavy Industry: A Dollar Index of Output, 1927-1937, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962), pp. 235-250.

Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective: A Book of Essays

Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective: A Book of Essays

Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective.

Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective.

Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective: A Book of Essays.

Journal Article Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective: A Book of Essays Get access Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective: A Book of Essays. By A. Gerschenkron. (Harvard: Harvard University Press (London: Oxford University Press), 1963. Pp. 456. 70s.) Maurice Dobb Maurice Dobb Trinity College, Cambridge Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Economic Journal, Volume 74, Issue 296, 1 December 1964, Pages 1001–1003, https://doi.org/10.2307/2228863 Published: 01 December 1964

Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective: A Book of Essays

Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective: A Book of Essays

Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective; A Book of Essays.

Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective; A Book of Essays.

Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective.

Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective.

Book Review: Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective

Book Review: Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective

Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective. A Book of Essays

Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective. A Book of Essays