1st Edition
Why States Matter in Economic Development The Socioeconomic Origins of Strong Institutions
This book examines the underlying conditions that give rise to states that are effective, efficient, and bureaucratically inclusive with their developmental policies.
In spite of humanity’s significant advancements in science, technology and institutionalization of universal human rights conventions in the last seven decades, many countries are still failing to achieve successful development results. As a result, enormous levels of inequality, poverty, and malnutrition prevail. This book focuses on the role of the state in the political economy of development, tracing the socio-economic origins of effective state institutions from a comparative historical-institutional perspective. Drawing on the case studies of South Korea, Brazil, India, Spain, France, and England, the study looks at how good state institutions form, and why these are central to the socioeconomic advancement of their populations. The book contends that effective developmental states are those in which state actors are able to effectively diminish and co-opt the power of the country’s landed elites during the early years of state building. Effectively, the power balance between these two classes determines the developmental trajectory of the state. Considering agrarian reform as the foremost indispensable policy tool to open conditions for positive changes in effective taxation, education, healthcare, and strategic sustainable industrial policies, this analysis offers a significant contribution to the literature on the sociology of institutions and the political economy of development.
As well as being a key reading for advanced students and researchers in these areas, this book draws real-life policy lessons for practitioners and policy makers in the developing world.
Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 2: Methodology and Definitions
Chapter 3: The Lessons of European State Formation for the Developing Countries
Chapter 4: The Socioeconmic Origins of South Korea’s Developmental State and Its Agro-Industrial Path to Development
Chapter 5: Brazil’s Stunted Development: Neither Enough Order Nor Progress
Chapter 6: India: Only A Developmental State Can Provide Roti, Kapada, and Makaan (Bread, Clothes, and Shelter) for the Nation
Chapter 7: Conclusion and Transferrable Lessons
Biography
Jawied Nawabi is Associate Professor of Economics, Sociology, and International Studies at the City University of New York–Bronx Community College.
Finally, a book on states and development that recognizes the role of power imbalances! This fascinating book provides a fresh and persuasive argument on why and how some states have been more effective in furthering economic development: the relationship between initial wealth inequalities (particularly of land) and the state bureaucracies that form in consequence. Must-read for anyone interested in the development process.
Jayati Ghosh, Professor of Economics, University of Massachusetts Amherst and Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India
The building of an effective state is critical to the processes underpinning economic development. In this important new book, Jawied Nawabi identifies a rigorous relationship between effective states and wealth equality, particularly with regard to land. The implications are stark: the transformation of land-based agrarian relations remains fundamental to the formation of state capacity. The many insights of this book make it essential for all students, scholars and practitioners of economic development.
Haroon Akram-Lodhi, Professor of Economics and International Development Studies, Trent University, Peterborough, Canada
In this excellent and historically grounded book, Jawied Nawabi reveals the truth of the following maxim: “strong landed elites, no socioeconomic development.” Nawabi shows how states across diverse contexts have used agrarian reform to weaken powerful agrarian actors, and how this weakening in turn has fostered successful development projects. Highly recommended.
James Mahoney, Professor of Sociology and Political Science, Northwestern University (USA)
Nawabi focuses on the key factors for achieving development through an insightful historical comparative analysis of the process of economic development of three well-chosen countries in both the global north and south. The reader gains insights into the requirements for an effective developmental state which is able to design and implement a sustainable development process. I particularly commend Nawabi for stressing not only that states matter but also that radical land reforms matter in countries dominated by rent-seeking landlords.
Cristóbal Kay, Emeritus Professor, International Institute for Social Studies (ISS), Erasmus University, Rotterdam, (NLD)
This richly-detailed, compelling, comparative institutional study of Brazil, India and Korea analyzes a vexing development conundrum: Agrarian power blocs frequently forestall state-led national projects designed to implement necessary structural changes, including land redistribution. Constraining entitled landholders’ entrenched autonomous power requires rarely-encountered countervailing developmental state capacities to transcend adverse colonial/postcolonial legacies.
James M. Cypher, Doctoral Program in Development Studies, Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas, Mexico
