فشار بزرگ یا شکست بزرگ؟ در اثر سیاست های صنعتی برای توسعه اقتصادی

The role of the government in industrialization is heavily debated. Some claim that extensive government involvement is key to initiate a sustainable development process, others see the government as an obstacle to it, pointing to the importance of government failure. We formulate a model, which explains why even a highly inefficient industrial policy can successfully promote big-push development. Moreover, we show that extensive government intervention is more likely to be successful when the initial level of development is low.

What role should the government play in the process of industrialization? Active state intervention appears to have been an important ingredient in the development of many of today’s rich countries, including the Western European economies, Japan, as well as the first generation of the East Asian Tiger economies. Rodrik (1995) argues that a large component of the “economic miracles” of Taiwan and Singapore should be ascribed to the active role of the governments in implementing big-push policies aimed at removing coordination failures in investment.1Cassen and Lall, 1996, in a critical comment of the East Asian Miracles study by the World Bank, argue that selective industrialization policies, and not just export promotion, were key to the rapid economic growth experienced in the region in the 1970s and 1980s, and moreover that there are important lessons to be learned for other countries from this experience. Similarly, Kohli (2004) analyzes the growth experience of Korea, Brazil, India and Nigeria. He emphasises the key role that State intervention has played in promoting industrialization in the least developed countries (LDCs) by supporting the profitability of private investments in early phases of economic development. However, it is fair to say that the focus amongst economists and donors in recent decades has shifted from the importance of market failure to that of “government failure” . Indeed, the World Bank and the IMF have emphasized the need for privatization and deregulation as conditions for their continued support of developing countries.2 Consequently, we have witnessed a trend of overall reduction in the relative (and often absolute) weight of the State in the economies of many developing countries. For instance, the share of public investment over total GDP fell in developing countries from approximately 10% in the early 1980s to 5% in 2000 (Chang, 2007).

The issue of the appropriate role of the government in the industrialization process is a long-standing and highly controversial one in the political and economic debate. Many economists would argue that picking-winner strategies are likely to fail, in particular in developing countries, because of “government failures”. Governments may fail in the difficult process of choosing the right policy objectives, selecting the appropriate policy tools and efficiently implementing these policies. While many observers agree that, in principle, the existence of a wide variety of coordination failures justify the use of industrial policy, there is also a widespread scepticism regarding the ability of governments to replicate the detailed intervention carried out by the newly industrialized countries. An important reason for this scepticism is the risk that, in a less developed institutional environment, such policies may be captured by interest groups and give rise to costly rent seeking (see Bjorvatn and Coniglio, 2006, and for empirical evidence on industrial policy and corruption, Ades and di Tella, 1997).