Developmentalism As Strategy

Developmental Macroeconomics: Access to Demand, the Exchange Rate and Growth offers a new approach to development economics and macroeconomics. It is a Keynesian-structuralist approach to economics applied to middle income countries that emphasizes the strategic role of demand in creating investment opportunities that are essential to economic development. It also explores crucial links between short-term full employment and financial stability with medium term growth. While this book emphasizes the central role played by the exchange rate it does not ignore other macroeconomic prices (the interest rate, the inflation rate and the profit rate). It develops a group of concepts and models and blends them together in the model of the tendency to the cyclical overvaluation of the exchange rate in developing countries. According to this model, the exchange rate tends to be chronically overvalued. In so far that this is true the exchange rate ceases to be just a short-term problem to be treated by macroeconomics and becomes central to development economics and should be crucially oriented to manage the exchange rate and keep it competitive at the industrial equilibrium level. The book closes with the presentation of new developmentalism – a national development strategy based on the system of models previously discussed that is both an alternative to old national-developmentalism and to liberal orthodoxy or the Washington consensus.

Developmentalism as Strategy: Interrogating Post-colonial Narratives on India's North East critically examines the post-colonial developmental trajectory of the Indian State at its northeastern periphery. Due to its unique historical geography, India's North East has been systematically marginalized and was imagined as "underdeveloped". The dominant narrative of India's economic nationalism has largely acted as a strategy within the North East in the context of resource appropriation and national security, and producing new arrangements of knowledge, power and practices. Adopting a methodological approach of interdisciplinarity, this book attempts to understand the exceptions to India's dominant development policy as applied in the North East. In the changing dynamics of political economy of development in the region, the book further examines the subsequent transformation of the narrative of the North East from a "geographic marginality" to a "natural gateway", and explores the alternative to such mainstream development approach by raising debates in India's North East.

Developmentalism as Strategy: Interrogating Post-colonial Narratives on India’s North East critically examines the post-colonial developmental trajectory of the Indian State at its northeastern periphery. Due to its unique historical geography, India’s North East has been systematically marginalized and was imagined as ‘underdeveloped’. The dominant narrative of India’s economic nationalism has largely acted as a strategy within the North East in the context of resource appropriation and national security, and producing new arrangements of knowledge, power and practices. Adopting a methodological approach of interdisciplinarity, this book attempts to understand the exceptions to India’s dominant development policy as applied in the North East. In the changing dynamics of political economy of development in the region, the book further examines the subsequent transformation of the narrative of the North East from a ‘geographic marginality’ to a ‘natural gateway’, and explores the alternative to such mainstream development approach by raising debates in India’s North East.

Why do so few countries achieve development success? Achieving development requires many changes over a short period of time, generating instability and risk. It is a deep and integrated economy of change involving force, strategic thinking, and ideological conviction - it emerges when successful development is seen as necessary for the survival of a political order. Developmentalism engages with the moral issues that this raises. Developmentalism: The Normative and Transformative within Capitalism uses a historical comparative approach to understand development as a transformation which involves a deep and integrated political economy of change - a shift from a state of 'capital-ascendance' to 'capital dominance'. It is only through a transformation towards capital dominance that mass poverty reduction and the construction of a commonwealth are possible. However, capitalist development is extremely difficult and requires a highly exacting political endeavour. The politics of development is conceptualized as developmentalism: a strategy and ideology in which governments exercise heavy directive power, endure instability and crisis, and secure a rudimentary legitimacy for their efforts. This book argues that developmentalism requires a conflation of successful capitalist transformation with some form of existential insecurity of the state itself. It flourishes when capitalist transformation connects to profound questions of sovereignty, statehood, nation-building, and elite survival. Developmentalism shows deep contextualisation of capitalist transformation as well as the massive improvements in material life that it has generated.

The global financial and economic crisis starting in 2007 has provoked the exploration of alternatives to neo-liberalism. Although neo-liberalism has been critiqued from various perspectives, these critiques have not coalesced into a concrete alternative in development economics literature. The main objective of this book is to name and formulate this alternative, identify what is new about this viewpoint, and project it on to the academic landscape. This book includes contributions from many prominent development economists who are unified by a form of "developmental pragmatism". Their concern is with the problems of development that preoccupied the pioneers of economic development in the mid-twentieth century, known as the developmentalists. Like the developmentalists, the contributors to Towards New Developmentalism are policy-oriented and supportive of institutional development and engagement with economic globalization. This collection has an over-arching concern with promoting social justice, and holds the general view of the market as the means to affecting an alternative program of development rather than as a master whose dictates are to be obeyed without question. This important collection sets the agenda for new developmentalism, drawing on issues such as industrial policy, technology, competition, growth and poverty. In broad terms, the economic development debate is cast in terms of whether the market is the master, an ideological neo-liberal perspective, or the means to affect change as suggested by the pragmatic perspective that is being termed neo-developmentalism. This book will be valuable reading to postgraduates and researchers specialising in the area of development studies including within economics, international relations, political science and sociology.

Complementarities between political and economic institutions have kept Brazil in a low-level economic equilibrium since 1985.

Why do so few countries achieve development success? Achieving development requires many changes over a short period of time, generating instability and risk. It is a deep and integrated economy of change involving force, strategic thinking, and ideological conviction - it emerges when successful development is seen as necessary for the survival of a political order. Developmentalism engages with the moral issues that this raises. Developmentalism: The Normative and Transformative within Capitalism uses a historical comparative approach to understand development as a transformation which involves a deep and integrated political economy of change - a shift from a state of 'capital-ascendance' to 'capital dominance'. It is only through a transformation towards capital dominance that mass poverty reduction and the construction of a commonwealth are possible. However, capitalist development is extremely difficult and requires a highly exacting political endeavour. The politics of development is conceptualized as developmentalism: a strategy and ideology in which governments exercise heavy directive power, endure instability and crisis, and secure a rudimentary legitimacy for their efforts. This book argues that developmentalism requires a conflation of successful capitalist transformation with some form of existential insecurity of the state itself. It flourishes when capitalist transformation connects to profound questions of sovereignty, statehood, nation-building, and elite survival. Developmentalism shows deep contextualisation of capitalist transformation as well as the massive improvements in material life that it has generated.