State-Directed Development: Political Power and Industrialization in the Global Periphery

[CONTENT] In his book State-Directed Development, Atul Kohli, Professor at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University, asks the long-discussed and controversial question why some countries have succeeded in creating wealth and raising the standards of living of their citizens while other countries have failed despite extensive efforts. To approach the question, Kohli presents four country cases in a comparative study - Korea, India, Brazil and Nigeria - providing extensive information on each country's colonial history, its class structures as well as the political and economic decisions that took place since their independence. Kohli divides the wide array of developing countries into three ideal-type categories of states: cohesive-capitalist states, fragmented-multiclass states, and neopatrimonial states. He points out that none of the four samples in the study ever reflected any of those ideal-type categories (though some have come close to one or another), and, in addition, that states tended at different times with varying governments and regimes to different categories. Cohesive-capitalist states represent, according to Kohli, nations with a strong, centralized government and are organized along a professional and meritocratic bureaucracy. The state in this example is insulated from any elite or popular interests, utilizes nationalism to mobilize support and to overcome fragmentation within the population, cooperates closely with businesses and investors, and intervenes heavily in the economy to enforce a rapid industrialization process. The nations that came closest to this description in Kohli's sample of case studies are Korea under Park Chung Hee and Brazil during the Vargas regime. On the other extreme of the scale, Kohli identifies neopatrimonial states, which are depicted as structurally weak states, taken hostage by a small cliqué of corrupt leaders whose only interest is personal aggrandizement. In a neepatrimonial state, corruption and rent-seeking is endemic, and leaders have no commitment to any public greater good. The nation that comes closest to this description among Kohli's sample is Nigeria for most of its post-colonial history. Finally, Kohli describes the fragmented-multiclass state, a state in which the population is fragmented along ethnic, tribal, class, religious or regional lines, but which is nonetheless ruled by a democratic regime. To maintain the ability for political action, the leaders of the latter state frequently furnish conflicting promises to different interest groups, while falling short on delivering them accordingly. Kohli sees the latter category relected in post-independence India. While neopatrimonial states are likely to fail in creating growth and development for understandable reasons in an environment of endemic corruption and rent-seeking, Kohli argues that "[c]ohesive-capitalist states have proved to be the most effective agents of rapid industrialization in the global periphery"