The limits of studies in comparative development of East Asia and Latin America: The case of land reform and agrarian policies

Third World Quarterly

Volumn 30, Issue 4, 2009, Pages 761-777

  Grinberg, Nicolas ^a   Starosta, Guido ^a  

^a LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

AGRARIAN REFORM; CAPITALISM; COMPARATIVE STUDY; DEVELOPMENT ECONOMICS; INDUSTRIALIZATION; LAND REFORM; MARXISM; POLICY STRATEGY; POLITICAL ECONOMY; THEORETICAL STUDY;

ASIA; EURASIA; FAR EAST; KOREA; LATIN AMERICA; SOUTH KOREA; TAIWAN;

EID: 67650499230     PISSN: 01436597     EISSN: 13602241     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/01436590902867243     Document Type: Article

References (59)

1. See, respectively, World Bank, The East Asian Miracle: Economic Growth and Public Policy, 1993, Oxford: Oxford University Press
2. and A Amsden, Asia's Next Giant, 1989, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
3. J Iñigo Carrera, El Capital: Razón Histórica, Sujeto Revolucionario y Conciencia, Buenos Aires: Ediciones Cooperativas, 2003.
4. C Kay, 'Why East Asia overtook Latin America: Agrarian reform, industrialisation and development', Third World Quarterly, 22 (6), 2002, pp 1073-1102.
5. Ibid, p 1076.
6. Ibid, pp 1074-1076. The third factor mentioned by Kay generally falls under the 'state autonomy' line of argument favoured by state-centred institutionalists and has been heavily (and, in our view, convincingly) criticised from very diverse perspectives. See, for example, D Chang, 'Demystifying the developmental state: A critique of the theories and practices of the state in the development of capital relations in Korea', unpublished PhD dissertation, Department of Sociology, University of Warwick, 2003
7. and K Jayasuriya 'Beyond institutional fetishism: From the developmental to the regulatory state', New Political Economy, 10 (3), 2005, pp 381-387. We shall therefore primarily focus on the question of land reform. In the following section, we shall also address the question of the interaction between agriculture and industry.
8. Kay, 'Why East Africa overtook Latin America', p 1093.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid, pp 1080-1082.
11. J Teranishi, 'Sectoral resource transfer, conflict, and macrostability in economic development: A comparative analysis', in M Aoki, H-K Kim & M Okuno-Fujiwara (eds), The Role of Government in East Asian Economic Development: Comparative Institutional Analysis, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997.
12. M Schiff & A Valdés, The Political Economy of Agricultural Pricing Policy, Vol 4, A Synthesis of the Economics in Developing Countries, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press for the World Bank, 1992.
13. Kay, 'Why East Asia overtook Latin America', p 1084.
14. S Haggard, Byung-kook Kim & Chung-inMoon, 'The transition to export-led growth in South Korea: 1954-1966', Journal of Asian Studies, 50 (4), 1991, p 852.
15. B Stallings, 'The role of foreign capital in economic development', in G Gereffi & DL Wyman (eds), Manufacturing Miracles: Paths of Industrialization in Latin America and East Asia, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990, p 59.
16. See C Furtado, Development and Underdevelopment, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1964, for a classic text from that perspective.
17. G Mathias & P Salama, El Estado Sobredesarrollado, Mexico: Era, 1986, p 140.
18. Kay, 'Why East Asia overtook Latin America', pp 1090-1091.
19. Ibid, pp 1095-1097.
20. R Barret & S Chin, 'Export oriented industrializing states in the capitalist world system: Similarities and differences', in F Deyo (ed), The Political Economy of Asian Industrialism, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987, p 29.
21. See JCH Fei, G Ranis & SWY Kuo, Growth with Equity: The Taiwan Case Oxford: Oxford University Press for the World Bank, 1979.
22. See L Prados de la Escosura, 'Growth, inequality and poverty in Latin America: Historical evidence, controlled conjectures', Working Paper 05-41(04), Madrid: Departamento de Historia Económica e Instituciones, Universidad Carlos III, 2005.
23. H Koo, 'The political economy of income distribution in South Korea: The impact of the state's industrialization policies', World Development 12 (10), 1984, p 1030.
24. M Hobday, 'Innovation in Asian industrialization: A Gerschenkronian perspective', Oxford Development Studies, 31 (3), 2003, pp 293-314.
25. Similarly, the comparatively higher absorption of labour was not a presupposition of the East Asian 'success' (as the logic of Kay's argument suggests) but its result. On Korea, seeMHart-Landsberg, The Rush to Development: Economic Change and Political Struggle in South Korea, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1993, p 178.
26. On Taiwan, see R Banerji & J Riedel, 'Industrial employment expansion under alternative trade strategies: The case of India and Taiwan: 1950-1970', Journal of Development Economics, 7 (4), 1980, pp 567-577.
27. B Stallings, 'The role of foreign capital in economic development', p 76.
28. Ibid.
29. See also T Cheng, 'Political regimes and development strategies: Taiwan and South Korea', in Gereffi & Wyman, Manufacturing Miracles, pp 154-157, for a more detailed account of Taiwan's and Korea's failed attempts at ISI deepening.
30. B Balassa, 'The lessons of East Asian development: An overview', Economic Development and Cultural Change, 36 (3), 1988, pp 273-290.
31. See Cheng, 'Political regimes and development strategies', p 154
32. and Hart-Landsberg, The Rush to Development, p 144.
33. See K Marx, Capital, Vol III, London: Penguin, 1981, pp 938-950, for the case of small agrarian capitals
34. and Iñigo Carrera, El Capital, pp 121-136, for the generalisation of this determination to all productive capitals.
35. C Kay, 'Latin America's agrarian transformation, peasantization and proletarianization', in D Bryceson, C Kay & J Mooij (eds), Disappearing Peasantries? Rural Labour in Africa, Asia and Latin America London: Intermediate Technology Publications, 2000.
36. See RL Harris, 'Marxism and the agrarian question in Latin America', Latin American Perspectives, 5 (4), 1978, pp 2-26.
37. A de Janvry, The Agrarian Question and Reformism in Latin America, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981, pp 83-84.
38. In Brazil rural wages were considerably below urban ones before the promulgation of the Rural Workers Bill in 1963. During the 1940s and 1950s the mass of value transferred out of the primary sector constituted an average of 44% of total profits in the economy, a figure which seems far in excess of the extraordinary surplus-value that could have been generated through the payment of the rural labour-force below its value. See N Grinberg, 'From the "economic miracle" to the "lost decade": Intersectoral transfers and external credit in the Brazilian economy', Revista de Economia Politca, 28 (2), 2008, pp 291-311.
39. See Marx, Capital, Vol III, pp 779-787, 882-907, on the distinctive determinations of differential and absolute ground-rent.
40. J Iñigo Carrera, La Formación Económica de la Sociedad Argentina, Buenos Aires: Imago Mundi, 2007.
41. In some Latin American countries agrarian ground-rent was complemented or even overshadowed by the magnitude of mining or energy-sources rents (the cases of copper in Chile or oil in Venezuela are paradigmatic in this respect).
42. E Lee, 'Egalitarian farming and rural development: The case of South Korea', World Development, 7 (4-5), 1979, p 514
43. and R Apthorpe, 'The burden of land reform in Taiwan: An Asian model land reform re-analysed', World Development, 7 (4-5), 1979, pp 519-530.
44. Kay, 'Why East Asia overtook Latin America', p 1075.
45. Ibid, p 1093.
46. See F Deyo, 'Economic policy and the popular sector', in Gereffi & Wyman, Manufacturing Miracles: Paths of Industrialization in Latin America and East Asia, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990.
47. See Cheng, 'Political regimes and development strategies', pp 147-151
48. and, especially, B Cumings, 'The abortive abertura: Korean democratization in the light of the Latin American experience', New Left Review, 174, pp 5-32, for an interesting cross-regional contrast of political regimes.
49. This magnitude is determined by the price of raw materials on the world market, the quantity of their output and the difference between the local natural conditions and those in the world's marginal lands.
50. See K Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, London: Penguin, 1993.
51. S Clarke, 'Class struggle and the global overaccumulation of capital', in R Albritton et al (eds), Phases of Capitalist Development: Booms, Crises, Globalizations, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001.
52. That is, in the forms taken by the reduction of social labour-time for the reproduction of the class of wage-labourers through the increase in the productivity of labour. See Iñigo Carrera, El Capital.
53. See L Alcorta, 'Flexible automation and location of production in developing countries', European Journal of Development Research, 11 (1), 1999, p 164.
54. See F Fröbel et al, The New International Division of Labour: Structural Unemployment in Industrialised Countries and Industrialisation in Developing Countries, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980.
55. Later on, but only as a concrete development of this initial simplest form of the NIDL, capital managed to disperse certain more complex parts of the labour-process.
56. See F Deyo, 'State and labor: Modes of political exclusion in East Asian development', in Deyo, The Political Economy of Asian Industrialism
57. This has been a result of the objective conditions for the valorisation of capital and not, as Kay claims, of the subjective 'rentier mentality' of Latin American industrialists. See Kay, 'Why East Asia overtook Latin America', p 1087. Otherwise it would be impossible to explain why the same TNCs that were demanding trade liberalisation in other parts of the world begged for protectionism in Latin America.
58. H Radice, 'Globalization and national capitalisms: Theorizing convergence and differentiation', Review of International Political Economy, 7 (4), 2000, pp 719-742.
59. See T Smith, Globalisation: A Systematic Marxian Account, Leiden: Brill, 2005, p 193.