As Deputy Director of the United Nations University's World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER), Augustin Fosu has managed to assemble a remarkably diverse group of contributors for this collection of case studies that focus on lessons that can be learned from economic development success stories. Four chapters on Scandinavian development, three on eastern European transition economies, and three on the industrialization experiences of Japan, Ireland, and Switzerland have been authored by sociologists, politicians, international and domestic policy experts, development economists, and one economic historian.

The chronological and institutional breadth of these studies allows Fosu to dig deeply to tease out the common themes.

These themes, for the most part, will be familiar to economic historians: human capital investments matter; openness to global markets promotes efficiency and innovation; and volatility, both domestic and foreign, suppresses investment and promotes the entrenchment of the status quo. Perhaps not surprisingly, given the policy-oriented nature of the work, another theme emphasized by Fosu is the importance of active and efficient government intervention in the development process. Governments and international bodies, such as the European Union (EU), are portrayed as key actors in the promotion of economic growth and development, managing public-private cooperative production, as in Finland, attracting targeted foreign direct investment (FDI), as in Ireland, managing the privatization of state assets, as in Poland, or imposing fiscal and financial stability, as in the former Warsaw Pact states of eastern Europe.

Although these themes may be familiar, economic historians might wish for a little more of the structure and discipline that characterizes economic theory in the case studies: what is truly endogenous in these nations' development experiences; and among the endogenous growth determinants, what can governments actually control? One might also be left a little unsatisfied because many of the counterfactual questions remain unasked: what would investment patterns in pursuit of purely private objectives have looked like in Finland; or what would the pattern in FDI have been in Ireland without the intervention of the Industrial Development Agency?

Although Ari Kokko begins his analysis of the “Swedish Model” with a discussion of land ownership and resource use in the mid-nineteenth century, his long-run perspective is the exception rather than the rule among the case studies that Fosu has assembled. Most focus on post-World War II transitions, with the chapters on the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland looking even more narrowly at the post-1990 period. The evolution of the underlying institutional environments is either ignored, or accepted as an exogenous process within which government policy decisions are being made. Among these development success stories, there would appear to be only a minor role played by the constraints and opportunities embodied in path-dependent growth processes.

The studies that make up Development Success are divided into three parts. The first part includes an analysis of the Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish and Danish development experiences. In Finland, the threatening posture of their Soviet neighbor during the aftermath of the Second World War introduced an element of uncertainty in economic decision making that encouraged private-public cooperation. Of course, being located next to an expansionist superpower is not much of a policy prescription for developing countries looking for positive growth lessons, but more generally, the notion that governments can mitigate uncertainty does have some traction. The idea that government intervention helps to suppress volatility, or the threat of volatility, can be seen in the Norwegian and Danish case studies as well, which describe how the Norwegian government encouraged the diversification of investment away from petroleum extraction, and how the Danish government calmed labor unrest through centralized wage setting, the imposition of high tax rates, and the subsidization of human capital acquisition.

In the second part of the book, which includes chapters looking at Japanese, Irish, and Swiss development, the idea that human capital, government intervention, and volatility all play an important role in the growth process again appears, but there is a little more emphasis here on institutional and historical context. In Japan, Fukunari Kimura points to the industrial and technological hangover from prewar development as the impetus for active government involvement in trade management, infrastructure building, and the training of an industrial and entrepreneurial elite.

In Ireland, it is the desire to move away from a dependence on the British market and British investment that motivated efforts to diversify FDI and embrace the European Common Market during the 1970s. And for the Swiss, Beatrice Weder and Rolf Weder point to geographic constraints and social and linguistic fragmentation as the underlying justification for policy choices, such as the acceptance of largely unfettered international financial and trade flows, and more fundamental constitutional guarantees, such as subnational fiscal autonomy.

The book's final section, covering post-1990 economic transitions in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland, is the most disappointing from a historical perspective. These chapters adopt a “comparative economic systems” approach in their focus on the merits of “shock therapy” versus a more incremental adoption of private market signals. Aside from a short discussion by Jan Svejnar and Milica Uvalic about the Czech experience, virtually no attention is paid to initial conditions that can be traced back far beyond the imposition of central planning during the aftermath of World War II. Could these countries' contemporary development patterns be more closely linked to underlying cultural, social, and economic institutions, or exogenously determined geographic endowments, rather than the vagaries of shifting EU and International Monetary Fund development strategies? The central themes revolving around human capital, openness, and the management of volatility are present in these chapters, but the narrower chronological focus impedes our ability to identify them with the same clarity offered in the other case studies.