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【Alice Amsden】 The Rise of the Rest: Challenges to the West from Late-Industrializing Economies →【討論】
Commentary - Nakamura Keisuke of the Institute of Social Science
In his commentary, Professor Nakamura noted that one of Professor Amsden's main projects is the application of the tools of management science to the history of economic development. He then made four main points. 1) Professor Amsden's argument suggests that there have not been any major discontinuous leaps in the accumulation of manufacturing experience, and that economic development has thus been primarily a continuous process. 2) Government intervention into the economy of the kind Professor Amsden describes, while important, cannot be sufficient to stimulate economic development. 3) Professor Amsden said little in her talk about "control mechanisms", a topic which she discusses in her forthcoming book. Professor Nakamura suggested that there might be a relationship between historical types of manufacturing experience and certain kinds of control mechanisms. 4) Referring to his own research in Indonesia, where he found successful technological transfer from Toyota to Astra in car manufacturing, he wondered how technological capabilities can be formed and noted that this was not clear in Professor Amsden's talk.
Professor Amsden began her reply by thanking Professor Nakamura for his excellent questions. Beginning with his third point, she noted that in free-market economics the mechanism which controls firm behavior is competition, but that when late-developing governments are subsidizing and protecting firms this mechanism is insufficient and must be supplemented by a different control mechanism, performance standards. She stated that she simply doesn't know the answer to Professor Nakamura's question and that she hasn't thought about the issue, though she thinks that the question was very fruitful. Taking up the first and fourth points together, she said that in her opinion the economic development has in fact been a largely continuous process. "Leapfrogging" over intermediate stages of development, she claimed, does not work: Russia, Gerschenkron's main example of the phenomenon, leapfrogged but failed. Japan's economic history has shown a much more incremental and successful approach. For instance, both Japan's Shin Nippon Steel and its "babies" (such as POSCO in Korea) have taken a step-by-step approach to economic development. The process of developing knowledge-based assets can thus be accelerated and some big jumps can be made (for instance, through technological transfer), but it is not possible to begin at the top. Path dependence has thus been absolutely critical, and "history really matters".
As for Professor Nakamura's second point, Professor Amsden replied that government intervention has made an enormous difference in economic development. Income distribution has also been a central factor affecting how well government performs, at times in somewhat counter-intuitive ways. For instance, governments in Latin America have been so concerned about unequal income distributions that they have been frightened of creating large-scale firms. India, too, had an enormous lead over Korea and Taiwan in cotton textiles, but the country was incapable of modernizing old mills in the 1960s because of the fear of social unrest caused by layoffs in a highly labor-intensive industry. Egypt, which has a long history of cotton textile production, faces similar problems. Korea and Taiwan, on the other hand, were able to build modern mills (using aid from the United States) to replace the capacity that had been destroyed by war (or which, in Taiwan, had not previously existed), and were enabled by equal income distributions to modernize. However, the control mechanisms or performance standards that enabled this are socially constructed phenomena, and thus the government role was enormously important.
As for the development of technological capabilities, Professor Amsden argued that there are three main stages. First, firms learn production capabilities, that is, how to produce goods and services, maintain machinery, and so forth. At this stage companies do not know anything about product design, a kind of knowledge that comes with the next stage, project execution capabilities. Here companies learn, for instance, to expand capacity and to work on basic design, detailed design, feasibility studies, startup, and trouble shooting on production lines. These kinds of knowledge, too, are not all learned at once, but in stages. Finally, firms learn to innovate. The major difference between China, Korea, Taiwan and India and Latin America has been at stage three. Catching up with advanced country firms, however, remains very difficult even for such companies as Hyundai.
＜記録：Derek Hall＞
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