The Concept and Evolution of the Developmental State

The developmental state is associated with the leading role played by the government in promoting industrialization in Japan and East Asia in the post-World War II era. Their respective governments pursued a series of policies, including tariff protection, subsidies, and other types of controls aimed at developing selected productive sectors of economic activity. Fundamental to the design of the developmental state for these countries was the creation of an alliance between politics and the economy, which materialized in the establishment of a specialized bureaucratic apparatus that had ample powers and coordinated the developmental efforts, at least in their initial stages. The developmental state and its associated policies are not unique to Japan or East Asia. A similar type of model, albeit a more restrictive one, was also followed in Latin America during the period that lasted from the end of World War II to the beginning of the 1960s and, in some cases, the 1970s. During this time, the state intervened in a number of areas and indeed made use of fiscal, exchange rate, monetary, and sectoral policies to promote the industrialization of Latin America. Neither are developmental state policies a feature limited to the twen tieth century. European countries used the same policies throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the United States during the