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Ethiopia provides one of the clearest examples of a ‘developmental state’ in Africa. Drawing on a deeply entrenched experience of statehood, the present Ethiopian regime has embarked on an ambitious programme, depending on the central capture of ‘rents’, to fund a massive expansion especially in communications, education, and hydroelectricity. High initial rates of growth have been achieved. However, the political setting is tightly constrained and the state has not allowed the private sector freedom of action to generate the required levels of production. Ultimate success will depend on the capacity to transform a state that has itself been central to the development process.

The literature on developmental states has built theories of growth-enhancing strategies through a mutually constitutive state–business relationship and institutionalised expertise through a professional bureaucracy. Whilst most evidence bears on the East Asian context, recent empirical work has focussed on state agency and new industrial policies in response to global market integration. Our paper contributes to this debate by exploring multiple patterns of state enterprise reforms that have enabled governments to generate competitive domestic firms. These reforms, then, lead to new theoretical insights as regards the diverse institutional arrangements co-constituting state–state relationships across countries and sectors. Overall, the paper views state-owned enterprises (SOEs) as complex organisations that bear new developmental capacities rather than vessels of rent-seeking interests.

This paper examines theoretical and methodological issues in the study of African developmental states. We argue that applying this concept beyond East Asia must take into account changes in the global economic context – in particular systemic tendencies towards deficient consumer demand – to uncover the conditions under which demand for commodity production remains or becomes expansionary. We further argue for a mixed methods case study approach to structural transformation, blending quantitative and qualitative evidence at multiple levels of analysis. The examples of concrete manufacturing and oil and gas in Nigeria and Tanzania illustrate our approach to researching state-led development in Africa.

This paper focuses on the changing governance of economic development in a globalizing era in relation to the dynamics of global value chains and global production networks. Based on recent development in such East Asian economies as South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore, I examine how, since the 1990s, the embedded relation between one variant of state institutions, known as the developmental state, and national firms, well integrated into global chains and networks spanning different territories and regions, has evolved. Because of the deepening strategic coupling of these national firms with lead firms in global industries, the developmental state's attempt to govern the market and to steer industrial transformation through direct policy interventions has become increasingly difficult and problematic. Through this process of strategic coupling, national firms have been gradually disembedded from state apparatuses and re-embedded in different global production networks that are governed by competitive inter-firm dynamics. While the state in these East Asian economies has actively repositioned its role in this changing governance, it can no longer be conceived as the dominant actor in steering domestic firms and industrial transformation. The developmental trajectory of these national economies becomes equally, if not more, dependent on the successful articulation of their domestic firms in global production networks spearheaded by lead firms. In short, inter-firm dynamics in global production networks tend to trump state-led initiatives as one of the most critical conditions for economic development. This paper theorizes further this significant role of global value chains and global production networks in the changing international political economy of development.

This paper argues that to understand the relevance of developmental states in East Asia and elsewhere, we need to focus on the changing development agenda in the early twenty-first century, especially how this connects with the global challenge of climate change and thereby sustainable, low-carbon development. It combines theories on state capacity and ecological modernisation to form the ‘new developmentalism’ concept. This is applied to study revitalised and refocused forms of state capacity aimed at realising the transformative economic objectives associated with sustainable development. New developmentalism helps us understand not only current state capacity practice in a climate challenged world but also how we have moved beyond original conceptions of developmental statism. It may be understood in the wider context of the sustainable development agenda and climate interventionism. As is argued, new developmentalism is most clearly evident in East Asia but can be applied in a wider geographic sense where strong forms of developmental state capacity are exercised towards meeting transformative sustainable development goals.

In recent years, an upturn in international commodity markets and the poor development performance of mineral rich African countries have catalysed the resurgence of debate and policy initiatives focused on extractivist models of growth in southern Africa. Beginning with debates on the ‘resource curse’, the East Asian developmental state and ‘developmental patrimonialism’, we extend the discussion to consider key unique challenges in contemporary African states: questions of finance and debt leverage, foreign capital domination and the problematic legacy of neoliberal structural adjustment. We consider the cases of Zambia and Zimbabwe, two countries heavily reliant on mining, in which current policy interventions have sought to anchor developmental state ambitions in the restructuring of the minerals sector. These cases illuminate the significance of current developmentalist politics in southern Africa, and underscore their specificity and constraints. Developmentalist projects are unlikely to succeed in the short term, but retain importance as emerging points of critique of neoliberal states in transition.

In the midst of intensifying global competition over green energy systems, Korean and Taiwanese companies are rapidly rising as serious exporters of smart microgrids. What explains the emergence of an East Asian presence in the global green energy sector? My core argument is that policymakers in Korea and Taiwan view smart microgrids strategically as a new developmental infrastructure, which will help position domestic firms onto a new competitive footing. I show that in Korea, this is taking place through the state's leveraging of the nation's innovation champions - globally leading chaebol or conglomerates and their networks of small and medium enterprise (SME) suppliers in the domestic market. In Taiwan, the state has leveraged government research institutes and their rich networks with internationally competitive SMEs and with large domestic firms. These efforts reflect the creation of a new form of public and private cooperation, which I refer to as 'hybridized industrial ecosystems'. These institutional mutations in the green energy sector suggest that the state's transformative capacity has been expanding, not shrinking as many recent writers on the developmental state conclude. Overall, the findings from this fresh new sector represents the unfolding of a new chapter of developmental thinking in East Asia.

Japan remains a developmental state where the state guides and oversees economic development, and the strong bureaucracy and businesses in turn complement each other in leading and shaping policies to achieve developmental goals. Japan retains the institutions deemed necessary to enhance the cooperative behaviour of the bureaucracy, businesses and politicians, and norms about what is important in order for an interventionist state to implement policies aimed at achieving economic development and the autonomy of the state. Externally, Japan has practised economic diplomacy with tools such as development assistance to achieve its economic security and to promote the developmental state model abroad. The process of making foreign policy contextualised and reinforced the norms, for both Japan’s domestic and international audiences. Japan today tries to promote science and technology as a main catalyst for creating industries and supporting its domestic, export-oriented economy. This is based on Japan’s own interpretation of its historical path and economic success and is also used to justify its engagement in the Arctic, a region where Japan does not have any sovereign territories. Japan’s Arctic policy is as an extension of its economic diplomacy and an attempt to export the Japanese developmental state model.

A developmental state is both a theoretical construct and a description of the political economy of certain nations, primarily in East Asia, over a specified time period. Theoretically, a developmental state is a particular type of state with a high degree of autonomy and solid institutional competence, allowing it to undertake a series of effective state-interventionist policies in pursuit of developmental objectives. Statism and state autonomy underpin the conceptual framework of the developmental state. The developmental state defied the neoclassical orthodoxy in development economics. Despite lacking the attributes of the mainstream neoclassical consensus in development economics and facing an uphill battle from such institutions, developmental states in various regions of the world have achieved high levels of economic growth. This study seeks to investigate the developmental state trajectories of Mauritius in relation to vital elements of developmental states. In an effort to do so, this study poses the following question: \"What accounts for Mauritius' development state success in Africa?\". By looking at the link between institutional building and economic performance, the study finds that Mauritius has replicated key developmental state institutions, including embedded and autonomous bureaucracy, making it one of Africa’s most successful developmental states.

Can the policies pursued by successful examples of developmental states be transferred to other countries under current global conditions? This question has represented one of the key concerns of the academic community in the wake of this reinterpretation of East Asian developmental success. This article will contribute to both the Latin American literature and the developmental state literature simultaneously and symbiotically, through arguing that Argentina in the period 2003–2015 represents an excellent empirical opportunity to revisit key debates associated with the concern of transferable lessons from the original East Asian developmental state experience.