State Capacity and Economic Development
State Capacity and Economic Development

Author: Mark Dincecco

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2017-10-26

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 1108335985

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State capacity - the government's ability to accomplish its intended policy goals - plays an important role in market-oriented economic development today. Yet state capacity improvements are often difficult to achieve. This Element analyzes the historical origins of state capacity. It evaluates long-run state development in Western Europe - the birthplace of both the modern state and modern economic growth - with a focus on three key inflection points: the rise of the city-state, the nation-state, and the welfare state. This Element develops a conceptual framework regarding the basic political conditions that enable the state to take effective policy actions. This framework highlights the government's challenge to exert proper authority over both its citizenry and itself. It concludes by analyzing the European state development process relative to other world regions. This analysis characterizes the basic historical features that helped make Western Europe different. By taking a long-run approach, it provides a new perspective on the deep-rooted relationship between state capacity and economic development.

State Capacity and Economic Development
State Capacity and Economic Development

Author: Mark Dincecco

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2017-11-27

Total Pages: 94

ISBN-13: 1108337554

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Analyzes the historical origins of state and provides a new perspective on the relationship between state capacity and economic development.

State Capacity and Economic Development
State Capacity and Economic Development

Author: Mark Dincecco

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2017-10-26

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781108439541

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State capacity - the government's ability to accomplish its intended policy goals - plays an important role in market-oriented economic development today. Yet state capacity improvements are often difficult to achieve. This Element analyzes the historical origins of state capacity. It evaluates long-run state development in Western Europe - the birthplace of both the modern state and modern economic growth - with a focus on three key inflection points: the rise of the city-state, the nation-state, and the welfare state. This Element develops a conceptual framework regarding the basic political conditions that enable the state to take effective policy actions. This framework highlights the government's challenge to exert proper authority over both its citizenry and itself. It concludes by analyzing the European state development process relative to other world regions. This analysis characterizes the basic historical features that helped make Western Europe different. By taking a long-run approach, it provides a new perspective on the deep-rooted relationship between state capacity and economic development.

Pillars of Prosperity
Pillars of Prosperity

Author: Timothy Besley

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2011-08-28

Total Pages: 393

ISBN-13: 0691152683

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How nations can promote peace, prosperity, and stability through cohesive political institutions "Little else is required to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice; all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things." So wrote Adam Smith a quarter of a millennium ago. Using the tools of modern political economics and combining economic theory with a bird's-eye view of the data, this book reinterprets Smith's pillars of prosperity to explain the existence of development clusters—places that tend to combine effective state institutions, the absence of political violence, and high per-capita incomes. To achieve peace, the authors stress the avoidance of repressive government and civil conflict. Easy taxes, they argue, refers not to low taxes, but a tax system with widespread compliance that collects taxes at a reasonable cost from a broad base, like income. And a tolerable administration of justice is about legal infrastructure that can support the enforcement of contracts and property rights in line with the rule of law. The authors show that countries tend to enjoy all three pillars of prosperity when they have evolved cohesive political institutions that promote common interests, guaranteeing the provision of public goods. In line with much historical research, international conflict has also been an important force behind effective states by fostering common interests. The absence of common interests and/or cohesive political institutions can explain the existence of very different development clusters in fragile states that are plagued by poverty, violence, and weak state capacity.

States in the Developing World
States in the Developing World

Author: Miguel A. Centeno

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2017-02-27

Total Pages: 493

ISBN-13: 1107158494

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An exploration of how states address the often conflicting challenges of development, order, and inclusion.

Building State Capability
Building State Capability

Author: Matt Andrews

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 0198747489

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Governments play a major role in the development process, and constantly introduce reforms and policies to achieve developmental objectives. Many of these interventions have limited impact, however; schools get built but children don't learn, IT systems are introduced but not used, plans are written but not implemented. These achievement deficiencies reveal gaps in capabilities, and weaknesses in the process of building state capability. This book addresses these weaknesses and gaps. It starts by providing evidence of the capability shortfalls that currently exist in many countries, showing that many governments lack basic capacities even after decades of reforms and capacity building efforts. The book then analyses this evidence, identifying capability traps that hold many governments back - particularly related to isomorphic mimicry (where governments copy best practice solutions from other countries that make them look more capable even if they are not more capable) and premature load bearing (where governments adopt new mechanisms that they cannot actually make work, given weak extant capacities). The book then describes a process that governments can use to escape these capability traps. Called PDIA (problem driven iterative adaptation), this process empowers people working in governments to find and fit solutions to the problems they face. The discussion about this process is structured in a practical manner so that readers can actually apply tools and ideas to the capability challenges they face in their own contexts. These applications will help readers devise policies and reforms that have more impact than those of the past.

Politician's Dilemma
Politician's Dilemma

Author: Barbara Geddes

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2023-04-28

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 0520918665

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In Latin America as elsewhere, politicians routinely face a painful dilemma: whether to use state resources for national purposes, especially those that foster economic development, or to channel resources to people and projects that will help insure political survival and reelection. While politicians may believe that a competent state bureaucracy is intrinsic to the national good, political realities invariably tempt leaders to reward powerful clients and constituents, undermining long-term competence. Politician's Dilemma explores the ways in which political actors deal with these contradictory pressures and asks the question: when will leaders support reforms that increase state capacity and that establish a more meritocratic and technically competent bureaucracy? Barbara Geddes brings rational choice theory to her study of Brazil between 1930 and 1964 and shows how state agencies are made more effective when they are protected from partisan pressures and operate through merit-based recruitment and promotion strategies. Looking at administrative reform movements in other Latin American democracies, she traces the incentives offered politicians to either help or hinder the process. In its balanced insight, wealth of detail, and analytical rigor, Politician's Dilemma provides a powerful key to understanding the conflicts inherent in Latin American politics, and to unlocking possibilities for real political change.

State Building in Latin America
State Building in Latin America

Author: Hillel David Soifer

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2015-06-09

Total Pages: 325

ISBN-13: 1316301036

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State Building in Latin America diverges from existing scholarship in developing explanations both for why state-building efforts in the region emerged and for their success or failure. First, Latin American state leaders chose to attempt concerted state-building only where they saw it as the means to political order and economic development. Fragmented regionalism led to the adoption of more laissez-faire ideas and the rejection of state-building. With dominant urban centers, developmentalist ideas and state-building efforts took hold, but not all state-building projects succeeded. The second plank of the book's argument centers on strategies of bureaucratic appointment to explain this variation. Filling administrative ranks with local elites caused even concerted state-building efforts to flounder, while appointing outsiders to serve as administrators underpinned success. Relying on extensive archival evidence, the book traces how these factors shaped the differential development of education, taxation, and conscription in Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru.

The Role of Elites in Economic Development
The Role of Elites in Economic Development

Author: the late Alice H. Amsden

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2012-09-27

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 0191634077

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Elites have a disproportionate impact on development outcomes. While a country's endowments constitute the deep determinates of growth, the trajectory they follow is shaped by the actions of elites. But what factors affect whether elites use their influence for individual gain or national welfare? To what extent do they see poverty as a problem? And are their actions today constrained by institutions and norms established in the past? This volume looks at case studies from South Africa to China to seek a better understanding of the dynamics behind how elites decide to engage with economic development. Approaches include economic modelling, social surveys, theoretical analysis, and program evaluation. These different methods explore the relationship between elites and development outcomes from five angles: the participation and reaction of elites to institutional creation and change, how economic changes affect elite formation and circulation, elite perceptions of national welfare, the extent to which state capacity is part of elite self-identity, and how elites interact with non-elites.

Developmental States
Developmental States

Author: Stephan Haggard

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2018-02-08

Total Pages: 122

ISBN-13: 1108605303

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The concept of the developmental state emerged to explain the rapid growth of a number of countries in East Asia in the postwar period. Yet the developmental state literature also offered a theoretical approach to growth that was heterodox with respect to prevailing approaches in both economics and political science. Arguing for the distinctive features of developmental states, its proponents emphasized the role of government intervention and industrial policy as well as the significance of strong states and particular social coalitions. This literature blossomed into a wider approach, firmly planted in a much longer heterodox tradition, that explored comparisons with states that were decidedly not developmentalist, thus contributing to our historical understanding of long-run growth. This Element provides a critical but sympathetic overview of this literature and ends with its revival and a look forward at the possibility for developmentalist approaches, both in the advanced and developing world.