Bureaucracies and Economic Development
Readings for the week:
Evans, P. 1995. Embedded Autonomy: States and Industrial Transformation. Princeton, New Jersey:
Princeton University Press. Chapter 3: ‘States’. E-READER
Leftwich, A. 2008. Developmental states, effective states and poverty reduction: the primacy of politics.
UNRISD project on Poverty Reduction and Policy Regimes. United Nations Research Institute for Social
Development. VULA
Evans, P.B. 2010. Constructing the 21stcentury Developmental State: Potentialities and Pitfalls. In
Edigheji, O. (ed.) Constructing a Democratic Developmental State in South Africa: Potentials and
Challenges. Cape Town: HSRC Press. VULA
® How bureaucracies are structured and characterized [such as their internal composition and
role in economic policy making] are crucial to facilitating growth and development
® Studies on the link between bureaucratic workings and economic development have tended to
focus on East Asia – where many countries have experienced tremendous economic growth and
improvements in standards of living (through the intervention in their bureaucracies)
® We will be exploring the following questions in terms of East Asian Bureaucracies:
- What features did their bureaucracies possess and have in common?
- Under what political circumstances were the countries able to create high capacity
bureaucracies?
- To what extent did their bureaucracies conform to the rational model?
[Intellectual property of Ayanda Sadek]
, [ALL WEEK 10 LECTURES]
• Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and Korea show BOTH very high levels of weberianess
(rational features) as well as very high levels of unexplained economic growth
• The scattergram above suggests that how Weberian your bureaucracy is can be effective
for expanding economic growth and development.
HOWEVER…
[Intellectual property of Ayanda Sadek]