Openness and the Market Friendly

Approach
to Development:

Learning the Right Lessons from

Development Experience

Ajit Singh
Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge, U.K.
This article was published in the journal World Development in 1994. Its
analysis contributed to UNCTAD's 1996 Trade and Development Report.
 Openness and the Market Friendly Approach to
Development: Learning the Right Lessons from
Development Experience
by Ajit Singh
Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge, U.K.

Summary C Two central policy issues in economic development today are:

how open should a developing country be to the world economy, and
what should the government do, or not do, to promote rapid growth. This
paper examines these questions in relation to the highly successful East
Asian countries, and contributes to the debate between World Bank and
heterodox economists. The paper suggests that there has been
significant convergence between the two schools on analytical and
empirical issues, but not on policy. It takes this debate further by
analyzing the principal issues still in contention.

1. INTRODUCTION

Two principal policy issues in economic development today are: (a) the
degree and kind of openness to the world economy a developing country
should seek; and (b) what should the government do, or not do, in order to
promote fast economic and industrial development.

These questions are controversial and have therefore been the subject of
an important debate, not least in the pages of this journal. In view of its direct
policy involvement in developing countries around the globe, the World Bank
has been a major participant in this debate. In a large number of studies and
reports,i World Bank economists have provided detailed analysis of these
questions. Specifically, they have argued that the best way to achieve
economic growth for developing countries is to be open to the world economy
and to seek a close integration with it. On the second issue, they have
suggested a relatively limited role for the state, encapsulated in the concept of
a "market-friendly" approach to development.

The importance of the World Bank analyses and conclusions on these

subjects for economic policy hardly needs any emphasis. These analyses are
however, also significant for another reason: since the beginning of this
decade, Bank economists have departed significantly from the extreme free
market neoclassical perspectives which often characterized their contributions
in the 1980s. In that sense, the Bank's views on these questions today
probably represent the professional mainstream.

2
 The main purpose of this paper is to carry forward the recent debateii
between the World Bank and the heterodox economists, which centers around
the analysis of the development experience of the economically highly
successful East Asian countries. It is suggested here that this debate has
already made considerable progress and has led to a degree of convergence
between the two schools on a range of analytical and empirical issues, though,
as is evident in the discussion below, not yet on policy. This paper aims to carry
this process further by identifying and commenting on the most important
issues which still remain in contention.

The paper, inter alia, outlines an alternative framework for examining

the question of openness, which leads to a rather different policy conclusion
than that above. It will be argued here that, in contrast to the
recommendations of the Bretton Wood institutions, developing countries
should actively seek "strategic" rather than "close" integration with the
international economy. Further, the paper suggests that government needs to
have a far bigger role in economic activity than is envisaged in the
"market-friendly" approach. It is contended that in mixed economy countries
with reasonably effective states, the government should pursue a dynamic
industrial policy to bring about the desired structural transformations in the
economy as speedily as possible, to achieve rapid economic growth. These, it
is argued, are the correct lessons to be learnt from the East Asian economic
record.

Taking into account previous contributions to the debate, the paper

concentrates on the following specific issues: (a) the question of the
effectiveness of industrial policy; (b) the issue of "openness"; (c) the nature of
competition in domestic markets; (d) the relationship between technology
policy, industrial policy and international competitiveness. Particular attention
will be paid here to the theoretical underpinnings of the World Bank analyses of
these issues. Specifically, the neglect of the role of "demand" in such analyses
will be highlighted. This, it will be shown, leads to incorrect interpretations of
the East Asian development record at key stages of the Bank's argument. For
space reasons, and also to sharpen the debate, the empirical analysis will be
confined here to Japan and South Korea C two of the most important exemplar
countries. A proper consideration of the role of the balance of payments
constraint and of demand leads to a rather different interpretation of the
experience of these economies from that provided by World Bank economists.

2. THE MARKET-FRIENDLY APPROACH TO DEVELOPMENT: THE BANK'S

THESIS

3
 The concept of the "market-friendly" strategy of development was put
forward in the World Bank's seminal 1991 World Development Report: The
Challenge of Development (World Bank, 1991, hereafter referred to as the
1991 Report). Representing the synthesis of what the World Bank economists
have learned from 40 years of development experience, the starting point for
the 1991 Report was the question: why during the last four decades some
developing countries were successful in the narrow but important sense of
substantially raising their per capita incomes while others were not? The
central analytical argument is that economic growth is determined essentially
by the growth of total factor productivity (TFP) of capital and labor. The
Report's analysis came to the conclusion that the more open an economy, the
greater the degree of competition and the higher its investment in education,
the greater would be its growth of TFP and hence its overall economic growth.
Although the significance of international economic factors was recognized, a
major argument of the Report was that domestic policy matters far more for
raising per capita incomes than world economic conditions.

With respect to economic policy, the Report concluded that: "Economic

theory and practical experience suggest that (government) interventions are
likely to help provided they are market-friendly" (p.5). In order for
"market-friendly" not to be a mere tautology, the Report, to its credit, defined
the concept fairly precisely in the following terms:

- Intervene reluctantly: Let markets work unless it is demonstrably better to

step in... [It] is usually a mistake for the state to carry out physical
production, or to protect the domestic production of a good that can be
imported more cheaply and whose local production offers few spillover
benefits.

- Apply checks and balances: Put interventions continually to the discipline of

international and domestic markets.

C Intervened openly: Make interventions simple, transparent and subject to

rules rather than official discretion.

Overall, the state's role in economic development in this

"market-friendly" approach is regarded as important but best limited to
providing the social, legal and economic infrastructure, to creating a suitable
climate for private enterprise, but also, significantly, to ensuring a high level
and appropriate composition of human capital formation. Even this limited role
for the state is, nevertheless, an advance over the earlier neoclassical thinking
which enjoined governments simply to avoid distortions, and to provide a
stable macroeconomic environment and a reliable legal framework.

4
 Both the neoclassical and the "market friendly" analyses have
encountered serious intellectual difficulties since neither can satisfactorily
explain the outstanding success of East Asian economies. Revisionist authors,
such as Boltho (1985a), Amsden (1989), Wade (1990), and Singh (1979, 1993
and 1994a) have pointed out that in countries such as Japan, South Korea and
Taiwan, the government has played a leading and a heavily interventionist role
in the course of their economic development.

This intellectual challenge was taken up by World Bank (1993), the East
Asia "Miracle" study (hereafter referred to as the Miracle Study), which has
produced a new analysis of the economic development of the high-performing
Asian economies (HPAEs) including Japan. This study fully acknowledges the
facts of enormous government economic interventions in most spheres in
these countries, much as documented by the revisionist school.

The study goes on to suggest, however, that such interventions,

particularly in the sphere of industrial policy, had in general a limited effect.
Some of these worked for some of the time in a few countries, but overall they
were neither necessary nor sufficient for the extraordinary success of these
countries. Thus, the study:

What are the main factors that contributed to the HPAE's superior allocation of
physical and human capital to high yielding investments and their ability
to catch up technologically? Mainly, the answer lies in fundamentally
sound, market oriented policies. Labour markets were allowed to work.
Financial markets... generally had low distortions and limited subsidies
compared with other developing economies. Import substitution was...
quickly accompanied by the promotion of exports... the result was lim-
ited differences between international relative prices and domestic
relative prices in the HPAE's. Market forces and competitive pressures
guided resources into activities that were consistent with comparative
advantage ... (p.325).

In other words, the final policy conclusion is still to reassert the

"market-friendly" strategy of development C developing countries are
recommended to seek their comparative advantage, to "get their prices right"
and to have free markets as far as possible.

3. THE TOTAL FACTOR PRODUCTIVITY (TFP) APPROACH TO ECONOMIC

GROWTH

The theoretical foundation of the World Bank analyses is the TFP

5
approach to economic growth. It is suggested that intercountry and
intertemporal variations in growth rates are caused by variations in total factor
productivity of capital and labor. Changes in the latter variable are thought to
be determined mainly by economic policy C the degree of openness of an
economy, the extent of competition in the product and factor markets, and
investment in physical and human capital (education), particularly the latter.
The underlying chain of causation is that competition and education promote
technical progress, and therefore TFP growth and hence economic expansion.
"Free mobility of people, capital, and technology" and "free entry and exit of
firms" are regarded as being particularly conducive to the spread of knowledge
and technical change.

Now at a theoretical level, there are several well-known objections to the

causal model underlying the TFP approach to economic growth. The model
assumes for example full employment of resources and perfect competition,
none of which obtain in the real world. Moreover, it is a wholly a supply-side
model which ignores altogether the role of demand factors.iii The latter, as we
shall see below, is a critical weakness which creates serious difficulties for the
Bank's analysis of the East Asian as well as other economies.

With respect to empirical evidence, even a cursory consideration of the

data presented by Bank economists themselves in the 1991 Report (Table 2.2,
p.43) reveals the serious limitations of the TFP approach. The table provides
figures for the growth of GDP, capital and labor inputs and TFP, separately for
each of the sub-periods, 1960-73 and 1973-87, for each of the five developing
regions as well as for a group of 68 developing economies; in addition, it
provides similar information for each of the four leading industrial economies.
These data show that in every region, and for each country or group of
countries shown in the table except South Asia (i.e. in nine out of 10
observations), the rate of growth of TFP fell substantially during 1973-87,
compared with 1960-73. For example, TFP growth fell in East Asian developing
economies from 2.6% p.a. in the first period to 1.3% p.a. in the second period;
in Latin America, the corresponding figures were 1.3% p.a. and -0.4% p.a.; for
the group of 68 developing economies, the TFP growth fell from 1.3% to -0.2
percent over the two periods. But, in South Asia C notably the only region
which registered a trend increase in its GDP growth between the two periods C
TFP growth rose from zero in 1960-73 to 1.2% p.a. during 1973-87.

In terms of the causal model underlying the World Bank analysis, this
almost universal decline in TFP growth in the recent period would be due to
policy mismanagement C low rates of technical progress caused by distortions,
lack of competition, lack of integration with the world economy, etc. The evi-
dence, however, is not compatible with such an analysis, since as Bank

6
economists themselves note elsewhere in the Report there has actually been
more competition, greater integration of the world economy, less distortions in
most developing countries in the latter period (particularly in the 1980s) than
in the former.

These facts are much more in accord with an alternative theoretical

model which would suggest that the decline in the world and the national
economic growth rates in the post-1973 period was responsible for the decline
in the rate of growth of productivity in most regions (Verdoorn's Law).iv The
decline in world economic growth after 1973, in terms of this model, was due
to a lower rate of growth of world and national demand caused by a whole
range of factors (e.g. the collapse of the Bretton Woods system, the growth of
real wages in a number of industrial countries outstripping productivity growth
in the wake of the first oil shock) connected with the fall of the "Golden Age" of
development of the OECD economies.v

4. EFFICACY OF INDUSTRIAL POLICY: CONCEPTUAL ISSUES

The TFP approach is prominently used in the World Bank economists'

critique of the industrial policy thesis of the revisionist economists. One of their
most controversial findings is what may be called, by analogy to Lucas's
well-known theorem,vi the industrial policy ineffectiveness doctrine. Bank
economists assert that contrary to popular perceptions, rigorous quantitative
analysis shows that these policies were largely ineffective in the East Asian
countries. The clear implication is that if industrial policies could not succeed in
these countries with their highly efficient bureaucracies, ipso facto these would
be inappropriate for the rest of the developing world which is not blessed with
such high-quality administrative assets.

In examining this "ineffectiveness doctrine," there are two prior

conceptual issues which require attention: What is industrial policy? How
should the "success" or otherwise of such a policy be assessed?

(a) What is industrial policy?

Governments in almost all market-economy countries intervene to a

greater or a smaller degree in the operation of their industries. For example,
even the US government, normally regarded as noninterventionist, in fact,
intervenes in industry through a variety of measures, such as anti-trust laws,
industrial standards, pollution regulations, and labor laws. Most people would
agree, however, that despite such extensive interventions, the United States
does not have an "industrial policy," while Japan and East Asian countries do.

7
 What makes Japanese interventions into an "industrial policy" is that in
Japan, such interventions are generally coordinated and viewed as a coherent
whole, and the government has a strategic view of the country's industrial
development in relation to the world economy. In this sense South Korea, and
other East Asian countries also have an industrial policy. Japan's strategic view
in the 1950s and 1960s was eloquently expressed by Vice Minster Ojimi of MITI
as follows:

The MITI decided to establish in Japan industries which require intensive

employment of capital and technology, industries that in consideration of
comparative cost of production should be the most inappropriate for
Japan, industries such as steel, oil-refining, petro-chemicals, auto-
mobiles, aircraft, industrial machinery of all sorts, and electronics,
including electronic computers. From a short-run, static viewpoint,
encouragement of such industries would seem to conflict with economic
rationalism. But from a long-range viewpoint, these are precisely the
industries where income elasticity of demand is high, technological
progress is rapid, and labour productivity rises fast (OECD, 1972).

At the end of WWII, the bulk of Japanese exports consisted of textiles and
light manufactured goods. In the view of Ojimi and his colleagues at MITI,
although such an economic structure may have conformed to the theory of
comparative advantage (Japan being a labor-surplus economy at the time), it
was not capable of raising in the long run the Japanese standard of living to
European or US levels. One interpretation of Ojimi's argument above would be
that the purpose of the Japanese industrial policy was no more than to pursue
the country's dynamic comparative advantage, but to do that as quickly as
possible. The other non-neoclassical interpretation, which does not necessarily
exclude the previous one, is that the purpose of the industrial policy was to
guide the market, and to deliberately create a competitive advantage in areas
where world demand was likely to rise rapidly and in which it would, therefore,
be in Japan's long-term interest to specialize. As Magaziner and Hout (1980)
note: "On balance, Japan's industrial policy has been anticipating rather than
reacting to international competitive evolution."

Support for the non-neoclassical interpretation is provided by the fact

that although in the 1950s and 1960s, MITI's structural program could be
justified in orthodox terms by the infant-industry argument, these structural
policies have continued, albeit in an attenuated form, right up to the present
day. MITI continues to provide blueprints and to seek wide business and social
agreement toward its future structural visions for the evolution of the Japanese
economy, as the world competitive situation and Japan's role as the world
economy changes.vii

8
(b) Assessment of industrial policy

How does one assess the success of an industrial policy like that of
Japan? It is not a straightforward question since one needs a credible
counterfactual C what would have happened in the absence of an industrial
policy? Would Japanese industrial production still have grown by nearly 13% a
year during 1953-73, its GNP by nearly 10% and its share in world exports of
manufactures change by a huge 10 percentage points? (Boltho 1985a).

One way to answer this kind of question in the absence of a controlled

experiment would be to compare the performance of countries which were in
other relevant ways similar to Japan, but which did not have an industrial
policy like that of Japan. This after all is the broad methodology underlying the
1991 Report which compares the experiences of different countries to find out
why some were successful and others were not. A closer analogy would be the
studies which assess the success of the Bank's structural adjustment program
by comparing countries which have such programs with those which did not.
There are of course well-recognized problems with such comparisons: to be
able to provide satisfactory evidence on the issue the two groups of countries
should be as similar as possible in all other ways.

A second way of assessing the success of Japanese industrial policy

would be to compare the country's postwar economic record under an
industrial policy, with its own performance in the prewar period when it was
not pursuing such policies. A third method of assessment would be to examine
the policy in terms of the goals which the country may have set for itself. In the
Japanese case, during the high-growth period 1950-73, a critical proximate
goal of MITI's was to ensure a current account balance at as high a growth rate
as possible. In other words, the balance of payments was seen as the main
constraint on fast economic growth in this period (Shinohara, 1982; Tsuru,
1993). The government pursued this objective by a wide range of measures
including inter alia a policy of extensive import controls, together with the
promotion of exports of certain key industries, which changed over time.

Boltho (1985a, 1985b) assesses the Japanese industrial policy on these

criteria and concludes that the policy was successful. Boltho's analysis is
complemented by Magaziner and Hout's (1980) detailed and careful evidence
based on case studies of several specific industries. These strongly suggest
that the industrial policies were successful in propelling the targeted industries
into preeminence in international competition. So how do World Bank
economists conclude that industrial policy in countries such as Japan or South
Korea was ineffective?

9
5. THE INDUSTRIAL POLICY INEFFECTIVENESS DOCTRINE

The first reason for this negative assessment is that Bank economists
have a very narrow definition of industrial policy, considering it only as a policy
to upgrade industrial structure.viii Industrial policy is not viewed as a whole in
all its various aspects. They also depart, without adequate justification, from
the standard methodology above for assessing the effectiveness of industrial
policy. Instead, they adopt a so-called functional approach to examine three
types of government interventions: (a) directed credit, (b) export promotion,
and (c) structural policy, and conclude that whereas (a) and (b) were
successful, (c) was not.

These policies, however, cannot properly be judged individually since (a)

and (b), as well as other policies such as extensive import protection for the
whole economy (and not just the favored sectors), were closely connected with
(c). All three, combined with other relevant policies should therefore be
assessed together. To recall the analogy with the Bank's own structural
adjustment programs, the Bank's procedure in the present case amounts to an
assessment of a single component of the structural adjustment programs, such
as devaluation, without reference to the interconnections with the rest of the
program. This is not to say that it is not an interesting and a legitimate exercise
to consider the effectiveness of a single component of a structural adjustment
program or of industrial policy. To do that, however, its links with the other
components must be explicitly recognized. It also requires a much more
elaborate counterfactual exercise, e.g. simulation of a macroeconometric
model, first with the structural adjustment program, and then with one in
which the component under reference is not considered.

Bank economists have not, however, carried out such research. The
interconnections between different aspects of industrial policy in countries
such as Japan or Korea have either not been examined at all or, as shown
below, not correctly interpreted. Nevertheless, within their own terms, the
Bank's industrial policy ineffectiveness doctrine rests on two empirical propo-
sitions. First, the industrial structure which emerged in industrial policy
economies such as Japan and Korea was not all that different from what it
would have been had these countries not pursued an industrial policy (i.e. that
the observed industrial structure was ex-post market-conforming and
accorded with the changing relative factor intensities and prices). Second, the
TFP growth of the industrial policy-favored sectors was no different from that of
the unfavored sectors.

As tests of the ineffectiveness of industrial policy, even in this narrow

10
sense, these two propositions are inadequate. To illustrate, suppose we take
the neoclassical interpretation of Vice-Minster Ojimi's rationale for Japan's
industrial policy noted earlier. In this interpretation, MITI was only pursuing
Japan's dynamic comparative advantage, helping create an industrial structure
to accord with it. It was attempting to do so, however, in as short a time as
possible. The resulting industrial structure would of course in equilibrium be
market-conforming. So that even if it were true that the market forces, left to
themselves, may have generated the same kind of industrial structure, it may
have taken much longer to do so and hence resulted in a much lower rate of
economic growth. Bank economists do not address this crucial issue of the
speed of adjustment at all.

The problem with the second test is that it overlooks the effects of
industrial policy on a country's balance of payments and its long-term rate of
growth of domestic demand. By confining their attention only to the supply
side effects of productivity growth and technical change, as predicated by the
TFP approach, Bank economists hypothesize that "spillovers" of these activities
will be confined only to the favored sectors or their close sub-sectors within the
two-digit industrial classification which they have analyzed. To the extent that
industrial policy helps to relieve the balance of payments constraint, however,
most sectors will benefit from higher rates of growth of production and hence
productivity (by Verdoorn's Law) and not just the favored sectors. In other
words, the spillovers will be almost universal.

Thus the second empirical test cannot discriminate between industrial

policy and nonindustrial policy states. To do that, one needs to look also at the
costs and benefits of industrial policy interventions in terms of their relaxing
the balance-of-payments constraint in the short and the long run. More
specifically, it would require inter alia, an examination of the contribution of
the favored sectors to the growth of exports or to the reduction in the growth
of imports over time.

It is the failure to consider such factors which leads Bank economists to

conclude that South Korea's Heavy and Chemical Industry (HCI) drive in the
1970s was unsuccessful, while heterodox economists suggest that it was a
success. The reason for these conflicting judgements is that Bank economists
do not consider its benefits to the long-term trajectory of the balance of
payments and hence to overall economic growth. Amsden (1989) points out
that the mainstay of Korea's celebrated export success in the 1980s was
precisely these HCI industries.ix

Parenthetically, a related point which is relevant here is that Bank

economists ignore the fact that in Korea the industrial policy-favored sectors

11
were not just capital-intense sectors but included textiles (precisely because of
its contribution to the balance of payments) for most of the period (see Chang,
forthcoming). The Korean government knew, as did the Japanese before them,
that however successful a country may be in the export of textiles, to have
sustained rapid overall rates of growth of exports over time, it needs to add
regularly new export products to the list. It is necessary to continuously
upgrade the industrial and export structure of the economy, albeit, if it pleases
the Bank, in accordance with the country's changing dynamic comparative
advantage.

It will be appreciated that the factor proportions Heckscher-Ohlin theory

does not yield any precise predictions as to where a country's dynamic
comparative advantage lies as it accumulates capital and skills. The theory
predicts a movement toward skill-intensive exports but does not specify which
ones. In Japan and Korea, the government selected and nurtured those
industries in which it thought the country had, or should have (in the
non-neoclassical interpretation) a dynamic comparative advantage.

Bank economists seem to be unaware of an ironic implication of their

analysis. If despite heavy government intervention, the Japanese and the
Korean industrial structures still conformed to these countries' dynamic
comparative advantage, a reasonable inference must be that on average the
government was correctly able to "pick the winners"! Hence, at this level of
analysis, in Bank economists' own terms, the Japanese or the Korean industrial
policies should be regarded as a success.

To sum up, the above discussion indicates that Bank economists arrive at
their industrial policy ineffectiveness doctrine by considering industrial policy
in a very narrow sense; by ignoring its multifaceted character and the
important linkages between its different components; and even within their
own terms by using inappropriate tests for assessing the success or otherwise
of industrial policy. The first of their tests is not valid because it does not
consider the critical issue of the speed of adjustment to a country's dynamic
comparative advantage; the second is marred by the fact that it abstracts from
the effects of industrial policy on the balance-of-payments constraint and
hence on overall demandCissues which are salient in the real world of
imperfect or incomplete markets in semi-industrial economies. The TFP model,
with its assumptions of full utilization of resources and perfect competition,
which Bank economists use is inappropriate for such analysis.

6. OPENNESS: "CLOSE" VERSUS "STRATEGIC" INTEGRATION WITH THE

WORLD ECONOMY

12
(a) Degrees of openness of the East Asian economies

The virtues of openness, international competition, and close integration

with the world economy, are stressed in several Bank publications (see in
particular the 1991 Report). Evidence suggests, however, that these virtues
were not in fact practised by either Japan or Korea.

To illustrate, the Japanese economy operated under rigorous import

controls, whether formal or informal, throughout the 1950s and 1960s. As late
as 1978, the total imports of manufactured goods into Japan was only 2.4% of
GDP. The corresponding figures for manufactured imports for the United
Kingdom and other leading European countries were at that time of the order
of 14 or 15% of GDP. During 1950-70, the Japanese domestic capital markets
were highly regulated and completely shut off from the world capital markets.
Only the government and its agencies were able to borrow from or lend
abroad. Foreign direct investment was strictly controlled. Foreign firms were
prohibited either by legal or administrative means from acquiring a majority
ownership in Japanese corporations.

With respect to the questions of exchange rates and distortions, the

Japanese Government maintained exchange controls and kept a steady
nominal exchange rate with respect to the US dollar over almost the whole of
the period of that country's most rapid growth (1950-73). Purchasing power
parity calculations by Sachs (1987), using Japanese and US price indices, show
a 60% real appreciation of the exchange rate during 1950-70.

Thus, despite the strong export orientation of the Japanese economy, it

was far from being open or closely integrated with the world economy. The
stories of Taiwan and South Korea, subject to certain modifications, also point
in the same general direction (see Amsden 1989 and Wade, 1990).

(b) Protection and export promotion: alternative interpretations

What was the role of this high degree of protection in the East Asian
economies? The Bank economists acknowledge the facts of this protective
regime but essentially argue that this was generally a negative influence which
was kept in bounds only by the government pursuit of export targets and
export "contests."

This interpretation has serious shortcomings. First, as noted earlier,

generalized protection was one of the mechanisms used by the Japanese and
the Korean governments to alleviate the balance-of-payments constraint.
Second, and equally significantly, there are both analytical and empirical

13
reasons for the view that protection played an important, positive role in
promoting technical change, productivity growth and exports in these
countries. To appreciate how protection worked at a microeconomic level,
consider the specific case of the celebrated Japanese car industry. Magaziner
and Hout (1980) point out that

government intervention in this industry was characterized by three major

goals: discouragement of foreign capital in the Japanese industry and
protection against car imports, attempts to bring about rationalization of
production, and assistance with overseas marketing and distribution
expenditure (p.55).

The government imposed comprehensive import controls and adopted a

variety of measures to discourage foreign investment in the car industry.
Quotas and tariffs were used to protect the industry; the former were applied
throughout the mid-1960s, and prohibitively high tariffs until the mid-1970s.
Moreover,

the government controlled all foreign licensing agreements. To make

technology agreements more attractive to the licensor, it guaranteed the
remittance of royalties from Japan. The policy stipulated, however, that
continued remittances would be guaranteed only if 90 percent of the
licensed parts were produced in Japan within five years.

This is about as powerful a domestic content arrangement as one can

get.

More generally, protection provided the Japanese companies with a

captive home market leading to high profits which enabled the firms to
undertake higher rates of investment, to learn by doing and to improve the
quality of their products. These profits in the protected internal market, which
were further enhanced by restrictions on domestic competition not only made
possible higher rates of investment but also greatly aided exports. Yamamura
(1988) shows how these protective policies gave the Japanese firm "a strategic
as well as a cost advantage" over foreign competitors. In other words
protection, export promotion and performance standards were complementary
policies.

(i) Foreign direct investment

An important feature of both the Japanese and the Korean industrial

policy has been the discouragement of foreign direct investment (FDI).
Available statistics indicate that among developing countries, Korea was

14
second only to India in its low reliance on FDI inflows. Foreign capital stocks
totalled just 2.3% of GNP in 1987 in Korea, above the 0.5% estimate for India,
but far below the levels of 5.3% for Taiwan, 17% for Hong Kong, a massive 87%
for Singapore, 10% for Brazil and 14% for Mexico UN (1993). In the view of the
World Bank economists, this discouragement was a self-imposed handicap
which was compensated for only by the fact that both Japan and Korea
remained open to foreign technology through licensing and other means. This
raises the question that if the Japanese and the Korean governments were as
efficient and flexible in their economic policy as the Bank economists
themselves suggest (to account for their long-term overall economic success),
how is it they have persisted with this apparently wrong-headed approach for
so long?

An alternative interpretation is that the approach was perhaps not so

wrong-headed. It was "functional" within the context of the overall industrial
policies which the two countries were pursuing. First, it would have been
difficult for MITI or for the Korean authorities to use "administrative guidance"
to the same degree with the foreign firms as they were able to do with the
domestic ones. Second, as UN (1993) emphasizes, there is a link between the
national ownership of the large Korean firms (Chaebols) and their levels of
investment in research and development. Korea has, in relative terms, by far
the largest expenditure on research and development (R & D) among
developing countries: 1.9% of GNP in 1988, compared with 1.2% in Taiwan
(1988), 0.9% for India (1986) and Singapore (1987), 0.5% for Argentina (1988),
0.6% in Mexico (1984) and 0.4% in Brazil (1985). The country's performance in
this area outstrips that of many developed countries (e.g., Belgium, 1.7% in
1987), but is of course still below that of industrial super powers, Japan and
Germany, each at 2.8% in 1987.

Third, Freeman (1989) stresses another important advantage of the

policy of mainly rejecting foreign investment as a means of technology
transfer. This, he argues, automatically places on the enterprise the full
responsibility for assimilating imported technology. This is far more likely to
lead to "total system improvements than the 'turn-key plant' mode of import or
the foreign subsidiary mode."

(ii) Price distortions

Bank economists in their econometric analyses in recent publications use

a quantitative measure of opennessCthe degree to which the relative domestic
prices in an economy differ from international relative prices. On that measure,
it turns out that both Japan and Korea were among the least open economies
(Miracle Study, p.301). Relative prices in these countries were more distorted

15
than in Brazil, India, Mexico, Pakistan and Venezuela, often held up by the
Bretton Woods institutions as prime examples of countries which do not "get
the prices right."

(c) The optimal degree of openness and strategic integration with the world
economy

To sum up, the experience of Japan and Korea comprehensively

contradicts the central theses of many World Bank Reports that, the more open
the economy, the closer its integration with the global economy, the faster
would be its rate of growth. During their periods of rapid growth, instead of a
deep or unconditional integration with the world economy, these countries
evidently sought what might be called strategic integration, i.e. they
integrated up to the point that it was in their interest to do so as to promote
national economic growth. If (as stated in the 1991 Report) the purpose of
Bank economists was to find out why countries such as Japan have been so
successful in economic development during the last 40 years, they have
clearly been using the wrong paradigm for examining Japanese economic
history. The basic problem is that the underlying assumptions of this paradigm
are greatly at variance with the real world of static and dynamic economies of
scale, learning by doing, and imperfect competition. In such a world, even
neoclassical analysis now accepts that the optimal degree of openness for a
country is not "close" integration with the global economy through free trade. x
In that case, what is the optimal degree of openness for the economy? This
extremely important policy question however, is not seriously addressed by
the orthodox theory.xi

Chakravarty and Singh (1988) provide an alternative theoretical

perspective for considering this issue. To put it briefly, they argue that
"openness" is a multidimensional concept; apart from trade, a country can be
"open" or not so open with respect to financial and capital markets, in relation
to technology, science, culture, education, inward and outward migration.
Moreover a country can choose to be open in some directions (say, trade) but
not so open in others such as foreign direct investment or financial markets.
Their analysis suggests that there is no unique optimum form or degree of
openness which holds true for all countries at all times. A number of factors
affect the desirable nature of openness: the world configuration, the past
history of the economy, its state of development, among others. The timing
and sequence of opening are also critical. They point out that there may be
serious irreversible losses if the wrong kind of openness is attempted or the
timing and sequence are incorrect. The East Asian experience of "strategic"
rather than "close" integration with the world economy is fully comprehensible
within this kind of theoretical framework.

16
 Such a framework can also explain why for the second tier of South East
Asian newly industrialized countries (NICs) C Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia C
the optimal degree of openness is different from that of the East Asian
counties. As noted earlier, in the South-East Asian economies, foreign direct
investment has played a far more important role than it did in Japan or South
Korea. As a consequence of the rapid development of the East Asian countries
the second tier NICs are faced with a different historical situation. This makes it
advantageous for them to attract industries which are no longer economic in
the first-tier countries because of the growth of their real wages C as
suggested by the so called "flying geese" model of Asian economic
development.

It should be emphasized that this model and the associated intraregional

pattern of trade and investment in Asia is itself in part a product of the
industrial policy in Japan, Korea and other countries. Unlike many other
advanced countries which try to protect declining industries, the Japanese
practice a "positive" industrial policy of encouraging structural change by
assisting the replacement of old industries by the new. This, however, involves
an orderly rundown of the older industries, including inter alia their transfer to
less-developed countries in the region (Okimoto, 1989).

Consequently, Felix (1994) suggests that East Asian foreign direct

investment in the region has been structurally more conducive to sustaining
backward linkage development in the participant economies than has been the
case of foreign direct investment in Latin America. He ascribes this to the fact
that the East Asian intraregional pattern has evolved along a dynamic
comparative advantage path dominated by cost-minimizing trade and
investment. The Latin American pattern, he suggests, has been shaped largely
by mercantilist market access rather than by cost-minimizing objectives. As a
result, it is more vulnerable to disruptive shifts of trading advantages deriving
from changes in the marketing and financial strategies of foreign firms.

7. COMPETITION IN THE DOMESTIC MARKETS

World Bank economists have traditionally stressed the merits of

competition in the domestic product, capital and labor markets. The practice of
the successful East Asian countries in this respect, however, has also been
rather different. As in relation to the question of integration with the world
economy, Japan and Korea appear to have taken the view that from the
dynamic perspective of promoting investment and technical change, the
optimal degree of competition is not perfect or maximum competition. The
governments in these countries have therefore managed or guided

17
competition in a purposeful manner: it has both been encouraged, but also
notably restricted in a number of ways.

(a) Collusion and competition in Japan

To illustrate, it is useful to reflect on some of the blatant restrictions

which were imposed by the Japanese Government in the 1950s and 1960s on
domestic product market competition. To meet its myriad goals which
continually changed in the light of economic circumstances facing the country,
MITI encouraged a variety of cartel arrangements in a wide range of industries
C export and import cartels, cartels to combat depression or excessive
competition, rationalization cartels, etc. According to Caves and Uekusa
(1976), in the 1960s, cartels accounted for 78.1% of the value of shipments in
textiles; 64.8% in clothing; 50% in nonferrous metals; 47% in printing and
publishing; 41.2% in stone, clay and glass; 34.5% in steel products, and 37.2%
in food products. Although these cartels functioned for only limited periods of
time and there was wide variation in their effectiveness, Caves and Uekusa
observed that "their mere presence in such broad stretches of the
manufacturing sector attests to their importance" (1976, p. 147).

These restraints on competition, however, are only a part of the story. An

equally significant part is MITI's strong encouragement of vigorous domestic
oligopolistic rivalry and international competitiveness. In general, whether
competition was promoted or restricted depended on the industry and its
life-cycle: in young industries, during the developmental phase, the
government discouraged competition; when these industries became tech-
nologically mature, competition was allowed to flourish. Later, when industries
were in competitive decline, the government again discouraged competition
and, as noted earlier, attempted to bring about an orderly rationalization of the
industry (Okimoto, 1989).

Yamamura (1988) provides a useful dynamic model to show how the

Japanese competition policy was an integral part of the country's industrial
policy. During the rapid growth phase of Japanese development in the 1950s
and 1960s, in the key industries which were receiving its attention, MITI
essentially organized an "investment race" among large oligopolistic firms in
which exports and international market share were significant performance
goals. In the real world, markets are always incomplete, and such a race
without a coordinator could lead to ruinous competition, price wars and excess
capacity, inhibiting the inducement to invest. In the Japanese economic
miracle, MITI provided this crucial coordinating role and orchestrated the
dynamic combination of collusion and competition which characterizes
Japanese industrial policy. Yamamura notes that MITI "guided" the firms to

18
invest in such a way that each large firm in a market expanded its productive
capacity roughly in proportion to its current market share C no firm was
allowed to make an investment so large that it would destabilize the market.
The policy was effective in encouraging competition for the market share (thus
preserving the essential competitiveness of the industrial markets) while
reducing the risk of losses due to excessive investment. Thus, it promoted the
aggressive expansion of capacity necessary to increase productive efficiency.

(b) Large firms and domestic competition in Korea

Turning to Korea, that country also did not follow a policy of maximum
domestic competition or unfettered market-determined entry or exit of firms.
The Korean government, if anything, went one step further than the Japanese
in actively helping create large conglomerates, promoting mergers, and
directing entry and exit of firms according to the requirements of technological
scale economies and world demand conditions. The result is that Korea's
manufacturing industry displays one of the highest levels of market
concentration anywhere. The top 50 chaebols accounted for 15% of the
country's GDP in 1990. Among the largest 500 industrial companies in the
world in 1990, there were 11 Korean firms, the same number as Switzerland.
UN (1993) observes in relation to the Korean industrial structure:

Such a structure is the deliberate creation of the Government, which utilised a

highly interventionist strategy to push industry into large-scale, complex
technologically demanding activities while simultaneously restricting FDI
inflows tightly to promote national ownership. It was deemed necessary
to create enterprises of large size and diversity, to undertake the risk
inherent in launching in high-technology, high-skill activities that would
remain competitive in world markets.

Nevertheless, there is ample evidence to suggest that the big business

groups still exhibited highly rivalrous behavior (Kim, 1992). This was because
under rapid growth conditions, as well as the rules of the game which the state
had established, there was neither the incentive nor the ability for big business
to collude. The Korean government went out of its way to insure that big
business did not collude, by allocating subsidies only in exchange for strict
performance standards (Amsden, 1989). After 1975 intergroup competition in
Korea heated up as each chaebol, or diversified business group, tried to qualify
for generous subsidies to establish a general trading company by meeting
government performance standards regarding minimum export volume and
the number of export products (Cho, 1987).

(c) An assessment

19
 There has been a major advance in the World Bank s thinking about the
role of free markets and competition in economic development. Implicitly
rejecting the view embodied in many previous documents and specifically in
the 1991 Report that, "Competitive markets are the best way yet found for
efficiently organising the production and distribution of goods and services,"
the Bank's recent seminal publication (the Miracle Study) accepts the need for
cooperation as well as competition to achieve fast economic growth.
Specifically in relation to Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, Bank economists
acknowledge the positive role of cooperation (or restrictions on competition) in
order to correct what they call "the coordination failures," which particularly
characterize industrializing country product and capital markets. In this
analysis, a much larger role of the government as a referee to mediate these
cooperative arrangements is explicitly recognized. Thus intellectually Bank
economists accept the heterodox argument that the governments in these
East Asian countries guided the market and controlled the competitive process,
and that this guidance was conducive to their fast growth. Nevertheless, after
this giant conceptual step forward for the Bank economists, in their policy
recommendations to other developing countries, they retreat to their earlier
perspective of free and competitive markets. The main argument made for this
reversal is that other countries do not have the institutional capacity to
successfully implement the required combination of competition and
cooperation.

8. INDUSTRIAL POLICY, NATIONAL TECHNOLOGICAL SYSTEM AND

INTERNATIONAL COMPETITIVENESS

In addition to protection, domestic competition policy and other

measures already discussed above, another important component of industrial
policy in the exemplar East Asian countries has been a national strategy for
technological development. The World Bank reports invariably stress the
importance of primary and secondary education for achieving economic
growth. They do not pay sufficient attention, however, to tertiary education
and to the technological infrastructure both human and physical which late
industrializers require to catch-up with the advanced countries. Yet, it is
precisely in these areas that the East Asian countries have excelled, which in
turn has played a major role in enhancing their international competitiveness
and their outstanding export success (Singh, 1989, 1994b).

A national system of technological advancement was first advocated by

Friedrich List in the first half of the 19th century to enable Germany to catch-up
with Great Britain. Although "catch-up" was much easier then than it is for
today's developing countries, many of List's insights remain valid.xii Following

20
the end of WWII, the Japanese adopted a national technological system which
spans the government, the firms, the universities, and indeed, the society as a
whole. Freeman (1989) identifies the following to be the principal elements of
this national technoeconomic strategy:

(a) The ability to design and redesign entire production processes, whether in
shipbuilding, machine tools or any other industry.

(b) The capacity at national, government level to pursue an integration

strategy which brings together the best available resources from
universities, government, research institutions, private or public industry
to solve the most important design and development problems.

(c) The development of an educational and training system which goes beyond
the German level in two respects. First, in the absolute numbers of young
people acquiring higher levels of education, especially in science and
engineering. Second, in the scale and quality of industrial training which
is carried out at enterprise level.

(d) The policy of eschewing, as noted earlier, foreign investment as a principal

means of technology transfer.

(e) The emergence of a far more flexible and decentralized management

system, permitting both greater horizontal integration of design,
development and production and more rapid response to change.

(f) Close cooperation between the central government and Keiretsu (large
conglomerate groupings in Japanese industries) in identifying future
technological trajectories, and taking joint initiatives, to adopt these to
enhance the country's prospective competitiveness.

It is notable that many Asian countries including Korea, Taiwan and

China, have been consciously following the Japanese model and building their
own national technological systems in the light of their resources and
requirements. It is also striking that several of these countries now have a
higher annual output of graduate engineers per 100,000 of population than
Japan. These countries are thus trying to outdo Japan in this respect, just as
Japan outstripped the United States. Freeman (1989) calls attention to the fact
that the third country in the world to introduce and export 256K memory chips
after Japan and the United States was not an advanced industrial country but
South Korea. It took that country less than 30 years, starting from a position of
barely any industry at all, to become a significant player in the world
electronics industry.

21
 None of the above is to underestimate the formidable problems which
the late industrializers face just to keep in step with the fast pace of
technological change in the world economy, let alone to catch up. Lall (1994)
and others have pointed to the formidable technological and other barriers to
entryxiii in the world markets which less developed country firms face. To meet
these technological challenges, developing countries require a continuing
build-up of national technological capability through an integrated system in
the ways outlined above. It is an incremental and long-term process requiring
concerted national effort in which the government necessarily plays a leading
direct as well as a crucial coordinating role. Without such effort, countries such
as Korea or Taiwan would not have ben able to hold their share of world
manufacturing exports, let alone greatly increase them as they have so
successfully done over the last two decades or more.

The World Bank emphasis on early education would not appear to be an

adequate means of enhancing the international industrial competitiveness of
semi-industrial countries. To compete in the world industrial economy, it is also
essential to have higher educational institutions, scientists, technologists and
engineers. It is useful in this context to go back to the earlier discussion of
changing factor proportions and its implications for comparative advantage
and structural changes in the economy. The changing factor proportions (in the
sense of human capital and skill formation) over time in the East Asian
countries, was clearly not simply an outcome of "natural market forces" as per
capita income rose. Rather these developments were very much guided by the
visible hand of the government in terms of its national priorities.

9. CONCLUSION

As detailed in the previous pages, there has been considerable progress

in the debate between heterodox and World Bank economists concerning the
outstandingly successful development experience of East Asian economies
such as Japan or Korea. There is now general agreement that governments in
these countries intervened heavily in all spheres of the economy in order to
achieve rapid economic growth and fast industrialization. It is also common
ground that during the course of their development these countries did not
have free and flexible internal or external product and capital markets.
Although these countries were export oriented, they eschewed close
integration with the international economy in terms of imports, foreign direct
investment or capital flows. The governments of these countries also
controlled and guided the competitive process in the domestic product and
capital markets through a highly effective combination of interfirm cooperation
and oligopolistic competition.

22
 There are, of course, still important areas of disagreement C particularly
in relation to the industrial policy ineffectiveness doctrine of the World Bank
economists. Nevertheless, on the whole, there is now much less disagreement
on the analytical and empirical issues than on policy. A main reason for the
policy differences is the belief of Bank economists that other countries do not
have the institutional capacity to implement the optimum degree of
competition and openness which the exemplar East Asian countries achieved.
How valid is this view?

The important point to note here is that the Japanese model was itself
imitated by the Koreans and by the Taiwanese. When Korea decided to embark
on the Japanese model in the 1960s, as World Bank economists themselves
admit, that country did not have the necessary institutional capacity. The
Korean bureaucracy at the time was incompetent and corrupt, as indeed was
the case with the Kuomintang bureaucracy when it arrived in Taiwan from
mainland China. Yet these countries were able to create the right kind of
bureaucracy and the other necessary institutions required for implementing
the Japanese model. If these institutions can be created by Korea and Taiwan,
and later on by Malaysia or Indonesia, it may also be possible to establish them
in many other countries. In the end therefore, this analysis raises the following
question: if in view of the ubiquitous coordination failures in the less-developed
economies, state-directed industrialization on the Japanese or Korean pattern
is the first best policy for achieving rapid economic growth, should the World
Bank not concern itself more with the institutional imitation and innovation of
the kind outlined above, than with prescribing market-friendliness or close
integration with the world economy (which these countries did not practice)?

ENDNOTES

23
i
. The World Bank's annual World Development Reports are useful sources for the
analysis of these issues. For reasons given in section 2, however, the two most
important documents in this context are World Bank (1991, 1993). The latter are
seminal works which provide a comprehensive account of Bank economists' thinking
on these and other development problems and their conclusions on public policy.
These are therefore the specific documents this paper draws upon in all references
made to the Bank's analyses.
ii
. See the commentaries in this journal by Amsden (1994) or World bank (1993).
iii
. There is an enormous literature on the subject. For a lucid analysis of the
relevant issues under discussion here, see Nelson (1981).
iv
. The classic references here are Verdoorn (1949) and Kaldor (1966). For a review,
see McCombie (1987). The TFP growth table in the 1991 Report shows that in
general, the larger the decline in the growth of output (in 1973-87 compared with
the earlier period), the greater the reduction in TFP growth, much as would be
predicted by Verdoorn's Law. Moreover, the South Asia region is the only one to
record an increase in TFP growth in the second period; it is also the only one with a
substantial trend increase in GDP growth in that period.
v
. During 1950-73, when the OECD economy grew at an unprecedented rate of
almost 5% per annum C twice its historic trend rate of growth C has rightly been
termed the Golden Age of capitalism. Glyn et al. (1990) provide a detailed analysis
of why the Golden Age rose in the first place and why it fell following the 1973 oil
shock. See also Maddison (1982); Bruno and Sachs (1985); Kindleberger (1992). To
avoid misunderstanding, it must be emphasized that we are not considering here
the question of short-term demand management, but rather that of the forces which
affect the long-term rate of growth of demand.
vi
. See for example Lucas (1973).
vii
. See further Johnson, Tyson and Zysman (1989). There have been important
changes in the 1970s and the 1980s in the nature and conduct of MITI's industrial
policies, compared with the 1950s and the 1960s. In general, MITI does not now
have the same kind of coercive policy instruments it did in the high-growth period. It
therefore has to use more indirect instruments as well as moral persuasion to a far
larger degree.
viii
. Thus the Miracle Study: "We define industrial policies, as distinct from trade
policies, as government efforts to alter industrial structure to promote productivity-
based growth" (World Bank, 1993, p.304).
ix
. The question of the time horizon over which the costs and benefits of industrial
policy interventions are assessed is of crucial importance. Amsden and Singh (1994)
point out that for 30 years there were few foreign cars to be seen on Korean roads
and few Korean cars to be seen on foreign roads. In other words, the Korean
government provided protection to the car industry for long periods of time because
of the difficulties involved in the learning and the assimilation of foreign technology
in developing countries.
x
. See for example Krugman (1987) and Rodrik (1992).
xi
. On this point, see the interesting review by Lucas (1990) or Helpman and
Krugman (1989).
xii
. See further Freeman (1989).
xiii
. The Miracle Study itself confirms these points. See Box 3.3 on Samsung
industries on P. 130.