Globalisation: Issues in World Change-
The Modernisation Thesis & the NICs:
The Newly Industrialised Countries, and their "successful" industrialisation, have been at the entre of much of the debate in development theory over the last three decades. Whilst their is some disagreement which countries should be included in the list of NICs, four East Asian nations are always part of the list which may or may not also include Brazil and Mexico. They are South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore but additionally some studies also included Malaysia and the Philippines. The economic performance of the key four Southeast Asian nations is dazzling. Together with Brazil they achieved growth rates in GDP of between 8 and 11 percent per annum in the period 1965-78, annual increases in manufactured exports of between 20 and 40 percent, and increases in manufacturing employment rose by between four and eight percent annually during the same period. To many conventional economists they represent a practical example of what can accomplished by the implementation of the right policies at the right time.
The "right" policies are:
liberalising imports, adopting "realistic" exchange rates and providing incentives for exports : above all theymanaged to get factor prices right so that their economies could expand in line with their comparative advantage: reliance on market forces and integration into the world economy yields results superior to protection and dissociation from the world economy..... The major lesson is that labour intensive export orientated policies which amounted to almost free trade conditions for exporters were the prime cause of an extremely rapid and labour intensive industrialisation.(Hubert Schmitz in Third World Industrialisation in the 1980s R. Kaplinsky[ed])
They have been described as the "embodiment of the neoclassical parable". For the IBRD or the World Bank they have in the past and still do represent the primary examples of successful industrialisation and a vindication of the conditionalities of their Development Funding. In addition it is also argued that as these nations have industrialised and modernised the social formulations in each has been transformed with a widespread diffusion of the social features, nuclear families, spatial and social mobility, diffuse occupational structures and a growth of a representative political institution, which characterise "modern" society.
Even some Marxists (eg Warren) saw, in the example of the NICs, evidence of the development in the Third World of a modernising Capitalist class, and hence creating the conditions for the social and economic transition to Socialism.
For the most part however the NICs are important in development theory primarily because it is asserted that they provide "proof" that with the right actions any nation can modernise and become fully participant in the world economic system. Like the late industrialisers they can be emulated with a very high likelihood of successful industrialisation.
As you will have already gathered the explanation for the industrial and economic success of the NICs provided by conventional modernisation theorists is not unchallenged. The emergence of the NICs can be characterised quite differently, and in a way which emphasises not the comparability of the NICs and the lessons that they provide but the unique set of economic and historical circumstances that led to their successful industrialisation.
The emergence of the NICs is seen as a response to a set of international circumstances which at one and the same time produced relatively favourable access to markets in the advanced counties, dramatically increased access to international finance and increasing relocation of production by transnational corporations to the periphery. These factors are seen as having conditioned the emergence of the NICs but not as having determined which countries would seize the opportunities. The view is that this was determined partly by location and geo-political significance; partly by the existence of a strong (repressive) internationally reliable regime .
Finally state control over industrial development is held to be extensive and decisive in bringing about the dynamic growth.
Strategic position in relation to the world political system cannot I would contend be ignored. All of the Asian NICs are the near neighbours of nations recognised at one time at least to the ideological political and economic enemies of the West. It is obvious then that if the position of the NICs was in many ways a unique historical, economic and political construct then any exemplary function that they may seem to have becomes very dubious, especially since they all also have in common repressive political regimes at least at the outset of the modernisation process.
There is also no attempt to take into account that far from simply emulating others for development the process does indeed seem to get progressively more difficult. Many nations have regimes which at one time or another have been faithful pupil of the World Bank and IBRD without the successful development of an indigenous industrial base.
In the case of Brazil in particular but also Mexico and also to a lesser extent the Asian NICs their use by modernisation theorists as examples calls in to question the notion of development itself. With both nations stumbling on the edge of a debt crisis for most of the last twenty years the success of the development strategy they have adopted does seem to be a little less clear cut than the modernisation theorists assert. In all of the NICs the benefit of industrialisation have been unequally distributed, and this distribution anomaly is more acute in Brazil and Mexico than the others.
The concept of modernity is itself called into question:
Are development and industrialisation the same thing? Is it the case that only the western industrial model of an industrial society is the only model of modernity?
