The Political Economy of Singapore's Industrialization: National State and International Capital

by Garry Rodan

A study which challenges the dominant understanding of Singapore as a case where correct policies have made rapid industrialization possible and which raises questions about the possibility and appropriateness of its emulation.

Genres: History

266 pages, Hardcover

First published May 15, 1989

Reviews

[Seyva · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am immensely grateful to Garry Rodan and the “Murdoch School” he helped found. It’s also a bit of a puzzle to me. Maybe Perth is just such a remote place that the pressures of academia and official
Bourgeois science are not as intense, but these guys have created an incredibly thorough body of work on the industrialization and political economy of south east Asia, while maintaining a consistently materialist analysis.

Though disguising it in the academic language of “social conflict theory” they are fundamentally Marxists, given away here or there by an overt reference to the communist manifesto. In my brief research I was unable to find any political affiliations that Rodan has held, so I am unsure if this was his intention but he has armed a new generation of Marxists with a wealth of primary material to develop political perspectives for the revolutionary era we are entering into and for that I salute him ✊🏼

[Abe · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wealth of useful and important information and history. I’m afraid the critique of dependency theory does not really stand up to scrutiny. Apart from the fact that the studies he cites in the beginning seem contradict the argument he makes about the structural inability of third world countries to improve their position in the NIDL the NICs in general have always seemed to be exceptions that prove the rule. They were able to establish some degree of economic flexibility precisely because of the demands of Western states fighting wars in Asia. South Korea in particular received enormous impetus to industrialize because of Japanese and American war efforts (the author obliquely references these circumstances in the Singaporean case in this book). And as the author notes Singapore is increasingly moving back towards greater reliance on and subservience to international capital. A broader point about “agency” ought to be made here as well because I really do find this kind of argument frustrating and incoherent/contradictory when invoked in these discussions. There seems to be a shunning of the notion of “dependency” because it supposedly doesn’t allow for any room for, and implicitly is, therefore sort of pessimistic or deterministic. But how exactly does the tale spun here allow for any meaningful agency or optimism either? If you enter very specific circumstances (dissimilar in many ways to Latin America which is what the dependency theorists were interested in) and a certain very specific set of policies are implemented you can avoid dependency maybe temporarily? In any case though I’m hardly an expert in dependency theory it seems like a straw man since Frank himself did not ignore historical contingency or specificity and did country based case studies. Additionally I don’t see why the nation state is a priori the proper unit of analysis because of the legacy of colonialism and the various global structural economic arrangements like the WTO, IMF, World Bank, and various regional political and economic arrangements like the Alliance for Progress and the CFA it’s not clear class relations are to be understood or map onto currently existing nation states. Also this is not a theoretical morass I care to concern myself with because I am not in this camp but I suspect his arguments about the role of the state in Singaporean development will not really convince many Friedmanite neoliberals or rational choice theorists since many do allow for/support the kind of lean efficient state run by a country like Singapore (the welfare state, for example, is pretty minimalist which is an important target of these types). You can find plenty of support for regimes of targeted tax benefits or interest rate policy fiddling (can be framed as pro-market or strictly negative influence) and support for development of human capital in the writings of neoliberal economists. They oppose the sort of more positive “market distorting” industrial policy of the sort that would require extensive use of tariffs for example. Only the most sort of hardcore Austrian thinkers object to any state intervention. I still think though with those qualifiers that this is a very good treatment of one of the more mercurial “tiger” economies