Vivek Chibber's book is exceptionally clear, fresh, empirically rich, and analytically tight. It clears some conventional cobwebs in thinking about developmental states. It should be read widely.

The great debate in development conventionally revolves around two axes: state and market. The developmental-state literature argues that rare successes among late developers come from particular configurations of state and society organized for economic growth (see Meredith Woo-Cumings, ed., The Developmental State, 1999). A more market-conforming literature holds that state interventions in the economy only generate rent-seeking behavior and distort market signals, creating inefficiencies. The heterodox position—that there are multiple paths to development and no single orthodoxy—has gained some heft since Joseph Stiglitz won the Nobel Prize in economic science (see his 2002 book, Globalization and Its Discontents). The analytical problem of developmental-state theorizing has always been that there is no parsimonious validated theory of growth. There are some consensus variables, but great dispute about their relative contributions, sequencing, path dependencies, conjunctural shocks, and outliers. Chibber tries to avoid the growth-theory trap, but of logical necessity employs a yardstick. He refers to “ineffective” state-guided capitalism, and explicitly compares India to Japan and Korea, which have installed effective institutions of the developmental state (p. 195–96). The implicit developmental-state metric is growth. No one would be interested in The Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) if Japan had grown no faster than Sri Lanka.

Chibber's dense and original study of India is counterpoised to a useful reinterpretation of the Korean case. The “secret of the developmental state” is leverage to discipline domestic capital (p. 74). State autonomy from dominant classes matters fundamentally. Anyone who thinks that this formulation antiquated Marxian structuralism must read this book. Chibber's innovative historiography shows that industrialists of India, in the critical historical period of state formation after colonial rule—l947–51—were able to defeat the developmental strategies of the Indian National Congress (INC). They did this by showing the muscle of an investment strike and by intensive lobbying within party and state. Within the INC, Nehru was marginalized; labor was demobilized. Capital won the formative battle over who rules economic policy. Chibber's evidence on this point is very clear. Planning in India was thus launched without the institutional base necessary for planning. The result was drift toward an “ad hoc and informal” (p. 177) system in which authority was fragmented and regulators bargained with firms and established ties through networks. This system of planning produced what I have called “embedded particularism,” rather than “embedded autonomy” (Herring, “Embedded Particularism: India's Failed Developmental State,” in Woo, ed., op. cit.). It was not growth friendly.

Korea began with equally low income and a failed strategy of import-substitution industrialization (ISI) but switched in the mid-l960s to export-led industrialization (ELI). ISI dominated the poor world; any state can distribute boons and exhortations and protect permanently infant industries. To make the leap to ELI, the state must be able to demand performance in return, and hold capital accountable, to break into international export markets. Chibber argues that the Indian National Congress made “a fatal misreading of the situation” (p. 44) in thinking that it could install a developmental state in the teeth of resistance from capital, once labor was demobilized. The fatal misreading became “locked in place.”

This bold title suggests very strong path dependency. What is locked in place is the incapacity of the Indian state to discipline capital. To be explained is not only the “installation” of the developmental state but also its “immutability” (p. 193). Yet both nations have significantly shifted development strategies over time. One wishes for a finer-grained sense of variance, in both strategies and politics. Pranab Bardhan argues that the Indian state made basic investments in the early period, and supported significant industrialization (more in terms of share of GNP than share of employment)—not so fast as some new nations, much better than others, and far better than the colonial record. But eventually, a form of democracy caught up with the commanding heights: Dominant classes in an uneasy coalition began to split up the state's surplus as largesse and to offer public consumption in the form of patronage and populism to maintain legitimacy (The Political Economy of Development in India, 1983). There is a question variance of analytical scale. Aseema Sinha's forthcoming book, The Regional Roots of Developmental Politics in India: A Divided Leviathan, demonstrates that developmental statism in India operates at multiple levels, with varied outcomes; some states—typically the size of average European nations—do quite well, some have temporally uneven records, and some do very badly. If one averages these state-level experiences, the mean is low, but this central tendency is like the mean temperature of Europe. One would want to know the temperature in Greece and Finland to make any use of the information. Sinha finds that the state of Gujarat, for example, does extraordinarily well, for reasons familiar in the developmental-state literature. The provincial state coordinates well with capital, intercedes on its behalf at the national level, and provides the incentives and aids that capital needs to be bribed into behaving properly.

Finally, there is a chicken-or-egg problem of causation. For Chibber, development models (ISI/ELI) orient preferences of capital, driving state-building outcomes. But “models” are the vector sum of pushing and pulling between state and capital in this account. Korean ELI was a “ ‘pact’ between the state and its bourgeoisie”; it was also a “happy accident” (p. 82) of place and time. Chibber sagely acknowledges “the role of sheer luck” (p. 203). Specifically, Japanese capital smoothed the way for Korean capital to export as part of Japan's upward product-cycle trajectory; otherwise, Korean capital would not have given up the comfortable niche in ISI occupied continuously by the Indian bourgeoisie. Multinational corporations investing in India not only did not create export markets but also forbade exports, blocking Indian capital's interest in export-led industrialization. Collaboration between Japanese and Korean capital made export-led industrialization a politically feasible option in Korea. India (and Latin America) lacked this option, as capital was too strong (and comfortable) “within,” and there was “no deus ex machina coming from without” (p. 204). Structural accounts allow for historical contingency, but luck, accident, and Japan sit uneasily with an argument for bringing domestic capital back into statist interpretations of developmentalism. Indeed, one is tempted to conclude: No Japan, no developmental state.