O’Connorian Models of Development: How States Literally Build Economic Growth

Abstract

Chapter 1 made a strong argument that the state policies that create employment and reduce poverty in the Third World are often the same policies that create employment and reduce poverty in the wealthy nations. This is in contrast to models of “late development” where the role of the state is to compensate for some kind of handicaps that peripheral and semi-peripheral economies face when dealing with adverse market and political pressures from the core. This is not to say that these adverse pressures do not exist. Nor is it maintained that compensatory strategies do not work. There is a distinguished pedigree of outstanding analysis in development sociology and economics ranging from Alexander Gershenkron (1962), to Peter Evans (1979) to Dani Rodrik (2007) who have established without a doubt that there are unique developmental strategies that apply to poor nations and to specific poor nations … and that these distinctive strategies can be very effective.