Developmental States
The issues of developmental states have concentrated on the state intervention in building and rebuilding country economy. It has become an important part of the political economy which is the flagship of nation building in the post-cold war society. The debate in this reaction directly refers to the concept of “Bringing the State Back In” in our modern society. Implicitly, the state-centric analysis in developing the state, the government has still played important roles to build a strong economy. It has pivotally and pragmatically been relying on the state since the peasantry revolution, to industrialized innovation, and modern economic liberalization in trade and commerce. Evans skeptically stated that state is the “guardian of universal interests”. But the controversial debate that Evans made was that how effective state can take action to intervene the economy? And are there viable alternatives for state structure as well as sound policy of good governance to back up this effective intervention? Historically, we can see that each country in the reading articles is state-centered development. They shaped in different manner and policy enhancements.
First issue is the debate on state structure. First chapter, Evans elaborated the different structures that can help state intervention implement effectively. In case of governance, the state structure has been called “vertical structure” and “horizontal structure” or “vertical governance” and “horizontal governance”. Johnson has spent much of his time to articulate the developmental structure of the Military of International Trade and Industry (MITI) of Japan towards its economic miracle. In that phase, the state’s capital accumulation to growth and sustainability pursued in different strategies clearly compared the different between the United States and Japan. Regarding these two different approaches of economic development, Weber began the practice with his distinction between a “market economy” and a “planned economy”. With the same goal in this concept, Dahrendorf made distinction between “market rationality” and “plan rationality”, Dor made distinction between “market oriented systems” and “organization oriented systems”, and Kelly made distinction between a “rule governed state” and a “purpose governed state”. However, Johnson stressed that his comparison of these two economic strategies distinction is not in case of Soviet-type command economy because it is not plan rational, it is plan ideology. Soviet’s developmental economy was owned by the state and the state is the ownership of the means of production, state planning, and bureaucratic goal-setting (Evans, 1985). This is not in his dialogue to challenge the efficiency and effectiveness of plan rational conducted in Japan.