Content area
Full Text
Comparative Politics The Rise of "The Rest": Challenges to the West from Late-Industrializing Economies. By Alice H. Amsden. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. 416p. $35.00.
Richard F. Doner, Emory University
Alice Amsden is one of the founders of the "statist" or "revisionist" school of East Asian economic development. Her earlier book, Asia's Next Giant (1989), refuted claims that growth in South Korea and other Newly Industrialized Countries was simply a function of high investment rates and correct prices, based in turn on the small-government fundamentals of stable, private property rights, macroeconomic é stability, and trade liberalization. Amsden, along with others, emphasized the benefits of sector-specific state interventions distinctly at odds with neoclassical prescriptions.
But Amsden's work was distinct in several ways: She highlighted reciprocity and discipline, in which the state provided a range of rewards, such as protection in the domestic market and low-interest loans, in exchange for successful performance in areas such as exports, R&D investment and new product introduction. She portrayed late development as a process of learning, often through large, diversified business groups, rather than of invention or innovation. And she paid special attention to the shop floor, where engineers and technicians were critical toward the acquisition of project execution and design capacities.
Amsden's new book, The Rise of "The Rest", builds on these and other themes to explain how a dozen countries-seven in Asia, four in Latin America, and one in the Middle East-"rose to the ranks of world-class competitors in a wide range of mid-technology industries" (p. 1). The first third of the book describes superficial pre-World War II industrialization in the "rest" due to halting and haphazard implementation of the "three pronged investment necessary to compete in modern industries: in large-scale plants and up-to-date equipment, in technological capacities and management teams, and in distribution" (p. 98). Despite its weaknesses, this prewar manufacturing, even under foreign ownership, generated a new cadre of engineers and managers who, Amsden argues, proved critical to postwar growth, especially where foreign ownership was weakened by decolonization.
The book's second...