NOT so long ago, my erstwhile colleagues were debating the latest instalment of government’s industrial policy in the National Assembly. In the course of that debate, some argued for a “developmental state” as a means to accelerate growth of the economy and to spread its benefits more equitably.
To be sure, however, the spectre of developmental state has been around in the development literature and discourse for decades, to analyse and unpack primarily the rapid development of the South East Asian economies. It has more recently been appropriated, as a cause celebre, by wannabe groups of the political left as representing a red-hot route to deliver the un(der)developed from their wretched lives. It advocates for the big state – or perhaps more appropriately, a more activist state – in the economic development of the poor countries.
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