Introduction

In developing countries it is not unusual to see donkey carts passing in front of gleaming skyscrapers, which shade crumbling apartment buildings only 20 years old. In factories primitive machine tools can be at work in one room, while advanced computer controlled machining centers are at work in another. In medical clinics doctors treat patients for communicative diseases or malnutrition 1 min, and morbid obesity the next. These juxtapositions are often seen as symbols of yawning wealth differentials, or of the rapid changes wrought by globalization, but in our view their deeper meanings and implications have not been sufficiently explored. Indeed, the simultaneity of high and low development indicators, particularly in today’s most successful developing countries, signals something unprecedented in human history, something that stretches policy instruments into new shapes and combinations, and demands new competencies from the state. These are sufficiently different from the “late development” model to warrant a new label. We call it “compressed development.”

In essence, the differences between “late development” and “compressed development” are two-fold. The first is the extent of compression. Development that unfolded over the span of a century and a half in the UK, and 50 years in Japan, has been compressed into even shorter periods in more recent developers. For a visitor from Japan, the primitive factory equipment being used in some Chinese factories today may spark nostalgia for the early years of Japan’s high growth era, while a visitor from the UK will have only seen such machinery in a museum, if at all. Both, however, will have seen the advanced machining centers before, since they are identical to those used in their own countries. Such are the visible aspects of compression. Less visibly, the social relations and values commonly associated with agricultural or early industrial societies—a high value placed on male children, for instance—can overlap with late or post-industrial emphases on equality and better educational opportunities for women, exacerbating gender tensions and accelerating trends towards later marriage, declining childbirth rates and societal ageing that typically come with later stages of economic development.

Studies of late development have noted the accelerated and uneven pace of change in attitudes and institutions. All late developers are, to some extent, compressed developers, but the later the developer the greater the degree of compression, and as Blinder (2006: 113) notes: “Sometimes quantitative change is so large that it brings about qualitative changes.”Footnote 1

The second difference is also related to time, in the sense of “industrial era.” Late developers like Japan had before them (in earlier developers) the image and reality of increasing scale and vertical integration in leading sectors. Some found new ways to learn through emulation and innovation, creating the “late development” model. Recent developers, however, confront a world in which production systems have become dis-integrated and geographically dispersed, particularly in those industries most responsible for driving the pace of development, creating new models of industrial, economic, and spatial organization. These are not only models for emulation and innovation, but systems open for direct engagement as well. Because production systems, especially in leading sectors such as electronics and automobiles, are globally distributed, developers must find ways to participate, add value, and specialize. Even if they attempt to reproduce elements of the late industrialization experience, recent developers cannot recreate an industrial model from the past. Instead, they are more likely to emulate and engage with the “global value chains” (GVCs) that now span developed and developing countries in a range of key industries.

These two differences, and their interaction, result in “compressed development.” Drivers include the accelerating development of new technology, especially information and communications technology (ICT); new business models featuring specialization and modularity, reversing the twentieth century trend towards vertical integration; the day to day and even minute to minute integration of cross-border business activities through global value chains; global capital flows enabled by financial liberalization; increased mobility of people across borders, both short and long term; and the hegemonic influence—and propagation—of liberal market economy concepts.

These drivers have, of course, been widely discussed in the framework of “globalization,” which has no shortage of critics in the area of development.Footnote 2 One criticism has been the assumption that now-developed countries (NDCs) represent the future of less-developed countries (LDCs). We are sympathetic to the nuanced and historically situated views of economic development that inform these criticisms, and in a similar spirit highlight the distinctive experiences and dilemmas faced by LDCs, even as they try to engage with or imitate practices in the NDCs. A question that lies at the core of any model of development is what role the state can and should play. Are there key strategies, policies, and social structures that can be isolated to create an ideal type that resonates with current realities? We believe that a focus on compression, and the novel features of development it creates, can provide new insights into the processes of economic and social development. These insights, in turn, can underpin policies for promoting development and dealing with its consequences that are attuned to the realities of the 21st century.

In his work on late development Evans (1995), building on the work of Amsden (1989) in South Korea and Wade (1990) in Taiwan, differentiated “developmental states” from “predatory states,” where incumbents pursue their own goals at the expense of collective projects and the bureaucratic capabilities of the state are limited to repressive apparatus. The main positive features of the developmental state, according to Evans, are 1) autonomy: a coherent structure, populated by professionalized, well paid, career oriented, elite bureaucrats that focus selectively on collective projects; and 2) embeddedness: strong connections to industrialists, land owners, and labor; connections that inform decision making and facilitate the implementation of specific policies, including disciplinary measures for non-compliance.

While limits on corruption and state competencies are certainly features common to any successful developer (along with basic neo-liberal prescriptions such as macroeconomic stability and strong educational institutions), we argue that the specific policies identified by scholars of late development—sectoral targeting, arms-length technological learning, a focus on process improvements in manufacturing, the nurturing of national champions, the development of vertically integrated national industries, the sequential implementation of import substitution and export promotion policies—are historically specific and no longer fully appropriate or adequate. Neo-developmental state writers have addressed this discrepancy to some extent, and have proposed refinements such as the “flexible developmental state” (O’Riain 2000), the “transformative state” (Weiss 2003), the “developmental network state” (O’Riain 2004, 2006), and so on. These do capture some of the new dynamics, but we argue that insights from the compressed development perspective, which encompass compression and the social as well as economic dimensions of development, point towards a new ideal type, which we call the “adaptive state.”

The paper is structured as follows. In the first section we review the “Late Development” model, and its application to the high growth economies of East Asia, including the challenges—practical and ideological—posed by the Asian financial crisis of 1997. We then consider the collapsing of development stages to the extent where industrialization and de-industrialization occur simultaneously. “New Production Systems, Global Value Chains and Compressed Development” examines the acceleration of development through participation in global value chains (GVCs). We present Taiwan as a transitional case from late to compressed development, and more recently mainland China as an emblematic case of compression.Footnote 3 In “The Human and Social Dimensions of Compressed Development” we broaden our perspective to encompass human and social development, including health, education and gender relations, suggesting that these must be situated more centrally in an analysis of compressed development. Finally, we consider how compressed development creates “policy stretch,” and how this points towards the “adaptive state,” an ideal type that purposefully pursues outcomes that policy-makers in places such as Taiwan and mainland China have embraced only partially, and in hindsight. Nonetheless, the overall result is likely to be greater unevenness, disjointedness, volatility, and inequality compared with late developers, which experienced more comprehensive and integrated industrialization at the national level. Our “Concluding Comments” point to the broader relevance of compressed development, which links the fates of developing and industrialized countries through a new set of interdependencies.

Late Development

It has long been argued that late developers can, and should, develop differently from the first industrializers. List’s (1873 [1983]) claim that Germany should develop differently from Britain, and should promote its nascent industries, drew on similar, earlier arguments by Hamilton and others in the US (cf. Chang 2002). Such views were systematized by Gerschenkron who wrote in his famous essay Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective:

“(I)n a number of important historical instances industrialization processes, when launched at length in a backward country, showed considerable differences, as compared with more advanced countries, not only with regard to the speed of the development (the rate of industrial growth) but also with regard to the productive and organizational structures of industry which emerged from those processes. Furthermore, these differences in the speed and character of industrial development were to a considerable extent the result of application of institutional instruments for which there was little or no counterpart in an established industrial country” (Gerschenkron 1962: 7).

Essentially Gerschenkron argued that the later a country develops, the more it will have strong institutional involvement in economic development and larger firms driving industrialization, for two reasons. First, late developers have the example of earlier industrializers, and therefore know what to emulate and what to avoid. Taking shortcuts requires the organizing power of institutions. Second, late developers lack capital, so it is rational for them to deliberately concentrate and direct limited capital to areas that have proved vital to early developers.

These tasks—catching up by taking shortcuts and channeling capital—require centralized institutional and productive capacity for coordination and enforcement. Gerschenkron showed that as a late developer, Germany in the late 19th century developed by using banks and large industrial firms as coordinators and promoters of rapid industrial growth. When Russia began to develop, the government was directly involved in economic development and production.

That the late development path will be taken, however, is far from certain. Hirschman (1971) found a different pattern of development in Latin America, which he called “late late industrialization.” Instead of concentrating on producer goods, building large industrial plants, and suppressing consumption to channel investment into large-scale production, Latin American developers prioritized consumer goods, started with relatively small scale manufacturing, and paid special attention to boosting consumption. In this case, the institutions designed to supply capital and entrepreneurial guidance became important only after the import-substituting industrialization process “had already been underway as a result of private, decentralized initiative for a considerable time” (ibid, p.95).

The most important reason for these differences, according to Hirschman, was “the fact that it has become possible for industrialization to penetrate into Latin America and elsewhere among the late latecomers without requiring the fundamental social and political changes which it wrought among the pioneer industrial countries and also among the earlier group of latecomers” (ibid, p.123). This made the late late industrialization route attractive, even if the long-term cost was a weak industrial base.

The rise of Northeast Asia—Japan, South Korea, Taiwan—from the late 1960s rekindled interest in Gerschenkron’s view.Footnote 4 Amsden (1989: 8), for instance, argued that the same set of factors explain late industrialization in both Europe and Northeast Asia: “The institutions of late industrialization that underscore its success, and whose absence is responsible for delay, are the following: an interventionist state, salaried managers, and an abundant supply of low-cost, well-educated labor.”

Many studies of development in Northeast Asia have concentrated on the key institutions of capital supply—the developmental state and its dominant relationship with banks and businesses. The concept of the capitalist developmental state was most powerfully formulated by Johnson (1982), and further developed by Wade (1990) and others, who argued that the Northeast Asian economic success in the cold war period was created by developmental states in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, all of which had strong and consistent commitments to industrialization, formed cooperative government-business relationships, and pushed forward economic development by using selective industrial policies that included the promotion of specific industries, the nurturing of large “national champion” industrial groups, and a judicious mix of import substitution and export promotion.

The 1997 Asian financial crisis tarnished the developmental state’s image. The same states that had received credit for economic success were now held responsible for causing financial disaster (e.g. Moon and Rhyu 2000). This view informed the “Washington Consensus,” which set the conditions imposed by the IMF for financial relief during the crisis. Partly in response to earlier criticism, the events and aftermath of the Asian financial crisis, and changes in East Asian countries themselves, developmental state arguments have been refined, with greater emphasis placed on reciprocal state-society interaction and to some extent entrepreneurship, in what Breznitz (2007) calls neo-developmental state writing (cf. Evans 1995; Amsden and Chu 2003; Weiss and Hobson 1995; Weiss 2003).

Without denying the many insights of the late development literature, or the critical importance of interactions between the state and society, especially leading businesses, we question whether would-be developers in Asia can, would, or should continue to follow the path traveled by late developers such as Japan and South Korea. This is not just because the “Washington Consensus” and accession to the WTO and other international organizations make it difficult to do so. It is also because the dominant production paradigm has changed, and because the extent of compression has foreclosed that path. While elements of the late development model remain attractive—in a new twist to Hirschman’s view—it is unlikely that the current governments of LDCs would seriously seek to suppress domestic consumption in order to raise capital for systematic, step-wise industrialization when there are other, tempting alternatives from abroad, as well as pressures to follow them.

Learning and Industrial Upgrading

For many observers, learning is the key to the industrial development that drives economic catch up (Dore 1986; Lall et al. 2005). For “backward” countries, technical and market capabilities must, at least in part, come from absorbing knowledge created elsewhere. Building on Gerschenkron’s ideas about the codification of knowledge, Amsden (1989) argues that development in the 20th century has not been dependant on indigenous inventive capacity, but on the ability to “borrow” technology from the world’s “technological shelf.” In contrast to the tacit, idiosyncratic knowledge necessary for invention, the codifiable, theoretical knowledge that feeds the process of innovation has made information about new products and processes more accessible and portable, providing developing countries with arms-length access to technical knowledge through formal learning as well as through licensing and reverse engineering.

This analysis is correct as far as it goes, and might describe the situation for late developers, but it is no longer sufficient. Technology that has been licensed or reverse engineered rapidly ages, especially in fast-moving technology-intensive industries such as electronics and information technology. To catch up with NDCs, where the pace of technological innovation has accelerated in recent decades, LDCs must move even faster. Additionally, technological change has become more collaborative, involving the interaction of a range of producers, advanced users, and non-corporate actors (such as university researchers) that are increasingly spread across national boundaries (Gibbons et al. 1994). All of this presents new challenges that require new learning strategies. A key strategy, which we discuss in “New Production Systems, Global Value Chains and Compressed Development”, is engagement in global value chains, where learning is by doing, continuous, and co-evolutionary. Kimura (2007: 97–98) calls this a strategy of “dynamic external fit,” where latecomer firms operating as suppliers in GVCs identify the domain of activities in line with the activities lead firms are seeking to outsource, and use what they learn to structure their ongoing search for new and better opportunities.

Compression of Stages: Simultaneous Industrialization and De-Industrialization

Development theory has, by and large, relied heavily on the concept of developmental stages. Rostow’s (1960) formulation, posed as a counter to Marxist stage theory, was particularly influential—and contentious. Rostow saw economic growth as progressing through five stages: traditional, transitional, take-off, drive to maturity, and high mass consumption. Industrialization is both the driver and indicator of development, and industrialization itself progresses through orderly stages: “A developing country, in an open economy context, industrializes and goes through industrial upgrading, step by step, by capitalizing on the learning opportunities made available through its external relations with the more advanced world” (UNCTAD 1995: 259, cited in Nam 2002).

Stage theory has been applied to East Asia in various formulations. Perhaps the most famous is the “flying geese” metaphor of Akamatsu, whose original (1930s) version saw development moving from the importation of foreign goods, through the substitution of imports with locally produced goods, to exports, followed by eventual sectoral decline as newer developers emerged through a similar process and successful developers moved on to new leading sectors (cf. Akamatsu 1961). Akamatsu’s model was subsequently extended to explain regional economic development in East Asia, with declining industries in the leading geese, particularly Japan, developed sequentially by following geese, such as South Korea and Taiwan. Indeed, this became the official Japanese government view in the late 1980s, influencing Japan’s international relations and industrial policy. Japan capitalized on the rise of its declining industries in other East Asian countries by exporting capital goods and licensing technology to them. In a further extension, Ozawa (2008) has supplemented a five-stage industrial development model—Stage 1) endowments-driven, Stage 2) resource-driven, Stage 3) assembly-driven, Stage 4) R&D-driven and Stage 5) internet-based—with a corresponding five stage model of infrastructure development (UNCTAD 2008). Insisting that “history repeats itself,” Ozawa compares (1970s) Japanese and (recent) Chinese Stage 2 infrastructure development, which focuses on resource diplomacy and acquisition to feed voracious resource-driven growth.

As useful as this analysis is, it ultimately points to the limitations of the flying geese model, and indeed stage models in general, for understanding recent developers.Footnote 5 At the same time that China is engaged in resource diplomacy and acquisition abroad, it is also supporting the development of assembly industries, science clusters and R&D, and engaging deeply in GVCs, as we shall see. Both Ozawa and UNCTAD note that transnational corporations can help to “time compress the catch-up process,” resulting in simultaneous stage development, but only in passing. Ozawa (2008: 7) further notes that India “plunged first into the most advanced stage of growth,” but abandons the insight and subsequently sees India as now “bolstering heavy and chemical industries [Stage 2], and it will go through similar stage-delineated experiences as it moves up the ladder of economic development” (p.33).

There are good reasons why compressed developers pursue Stages 4 and 5 (in Ozawa’s model) concurrently with Stages 1–3, if they can. First and most obviously, this is what NDCs are doing. Second, they need to if they wish to retain or attract their brightest researchers or professionals back from abroad. Third, they need to nurture skills in activities related to Stages 4 and 5 to participate in GVCs, which have substantially eroded the vertically and nationally integrated production systems which late developers aspired to.

The result of compression is not just a blurring of stages, but simultaneous industrialization and de-industrialization. De-industrialization began in the UK in the 1960s, almost two centuries after the country embarked on industrialization (Singh 1977; Cairncross 1979). Rowthorn and Coutts (2004) document the spread of de-industrialization from early to recent industrializers such as Korea and Taiwan, economies that began to industrialize rapidly in the 1960s, and within three decades were well on their way down the de-industrialization curve. In fact, the turning point of the inverted U (representing changing share of employment in manufacturing with per capita GDP growth) appears to be happening at lower and lower levels of GDP, and the inverted U has become shallower in more recent developers (Palma 2005). As Dasgupta and Singh (2006: 5) note: “In the past this historical turning point occurred at a per capita of almost US$10,000 in current prices; it is now estimated to take place at levels of income as low as US$3,000 in some countries.”

Dasgupta and Singh call this phenomenon “premature de-industrialization,” but it can also be seen as a collapse of developmental stages. Workers who leave farms for factories, will in turn leave those factories for the service sector within 2 or 3 years, often via compulsory military service.Footnote 6 Urban university graduates find work in domestic or foreign businesses that interact on a daily basis with engineers, managers and buyers located abroad, or in “born global” startups or the businesses supporting them.

It sum, it appears that the “stages” of development have been compressed to such an extent as to render the concept empirically problematic if not meaningless. “Stages” may still inform the analysis of development, but mainly as a historical comparison to processes that are now likely to occur simultaneously rather than sequentially. This means that different “stages” of development interact and influence each other in real time, a situation which not only presents new policy choices, but also policy dilemmas which early and even late developers did not confront.

New Production Systems, Global Value Chains and Compressed Development

The (East Asian) late development model relied on a close interaction between the state on the one hand and corporate and industry leaders on the other, channeled into the development and implementation of industrial policy. This interaction sought to nurture large, diversified, vertically integrated firms in strategic, or “propulsive” industries (Hirschman 1958) that would be competitive in world markets. It also involved nurturing upstream, or “backward” linkages to domestic suppliers and feeder industries, with the objective of achieving as much domestic value creation and capture as possible. Geographic fragmentation, if it happened at all, typically occurred later, in mature industries or low value added segments of the value chain—the “flying geese” discussed earlier.

Today the mosaic of specialization and intermediate goods flows that comprise global value chains (GVCs) have fundamentally altered the competitive and landscape in which development takes place (Humphrey and Schmitz 2002; Schmitz 2004; Sturgeon and Lester 2004; Gereffi et al. 2005; Ponte and Gibbon 2005; Gereffi 2006). GVCs create powerful challenges to nationally and vertically integrated production systems, effectively foreclosing the late development model path to most recent developers. At the same time, GVCs can create new platforms for development and opportunities for participation with limited initial resources (both capital and intellectual) by providing access to complementary resources that can accelerate development. Successful engagement in GVCs, however, creates new challenges and further intensifies compression.

The rise of GVCs can be discerned, in part, through an examination of intermediate goods trade. Trade in intermediate goods is indicative of GVCs because fragmented production processes require that parts, components, and partially manufactured subassemblies cross borders—sometimes more than once—before finished goods are shipped to final markets (Feenstra 1998). The plants producing electronics, apparel, and consumer goods in China, for example, collect inputs locally, but also from a number of other countries in East Asia and the West. Some intermediate goods make their way into finished goods that are exported, and some into products that are sold in domestic markets. Still others are exported to third countries, such as Mexico and the Czech Republic, where they are combined with other imported and locally produced components in the final assembly of products destined for both regional export and domestic consumption.

On the industrialized country side, the formation of GVCs has been driven by lead firms (branded product firms such as Apple, Nike, Volkswagon, and Sony) and global buyers (huge retailers such as Wal-Mart, Costco, JC Penney, Tesco, and Uniqlo) seeking to cut costs, participate in emerging markets, and tap the growing capabilities in developing countries. The United States, Germany, and Japan are ranked first, second, and fourth on a list of total trade in manufactured intermediates. This signifies the role of firms from industrialized countries in coordinating GVCs, supplying key inputs such as advanced machinery and high value components, and sourcing other intermediate inputs from low cost locations.

On the supply side, the countries of East Asia, especially China (broadly defined), but also Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, and Indonesia, have led the way, with several other countries such as Mexico, India, Brazil and Turkey ranking high on a list of developing countries’ involvement in intermediate goods trade (see Table 1). While the pace of growth in intermediate goods trade among the top developing countries has been high across the board, as it has been for the NDCs in East Asia and the CIS and former East European states, the role of China in goods producing GVCs has increased most dramatically, by 24% per year in the period 1988 to 2006. Statistics on intermediate goods trade also show that three assembly industries—especially electronics but also motor vehicles and to a lesser extent apparel—have been important drivers of GVC development, at least in manufacturing (Sturgeon and Memedovic 2010). In services GVCs, India has been advancing quickly up the capability ladder from back office functions, basic software coding, and call center services to higher-level business functions and elements of R&D (Dossani and Kenney 2003).

Table 1 Top ranked developing countries according to value of total trade in intermediate manufactured goods (IMG), 2006, with growth rates since 1988
Full size table

Real-time Integration of East and West

Global value chains embody three new dynamics; the fragmentation of value-added chains, the geographic dispersal of the fragments, and the functional integration of work, firms and of entire industries across borders. As Dean et al. (2007: 1) put it:

…production processes are sliced thinner and thinner into many stages, and the resulting production fragments are carried out in different locations. The production of a finished product thus involves the participation of many economies, with countries specializing in different fragments of the vertical production chain. … While the international division of labor in the global economy is nothing new, the vast scope and the intricate nature of this pattern of global production sharing seems genuinely unprecedented.

On one side of the coin, GVCs have been characterized by increasing fragmentation, but the other side is rapid improvements in the functional integration of these globally dispersed fragments. Of the array of new techniques, technologies, and infrastructure improvements that enable better functional integration, three of the most important are: 1) improvements in information technology and industry-level standards that allow the codification and easy hand-off of complex information from one stage of the chain to the next (Baldwin and Clark 2000; Balconi 2002); 2) flexible, computerized production machinery that allows capital-intensive manufacturing capacity to be shared and pooled like labor-intensive manufacturing (Brusoni and Principe 2001; Langlois 2003); and, 3) supply-chain management tools, such as “enterprise resource planning” software and radio-frequency identification tags, that are pushing even labor-intensive industries up the technology curve (Abernathy et al. 1999). Taken in combination, these techniques and technologies have enabled new levels of “modularity” in GVCs (Baldwin and Clark 2000; Takeishi and Fujimoto 2001; Sturgeon 2002), and have allowed suppliers to link to buyers in ways that do not require geographic co-location, enlarging the field for the participation of developing countries in GVCs (Gereffi et al. 2005).

Taiwan and the End of Integrated National Development

East Asian industrializers have linked to GVCs in different ways. Japanese trading companies were some of the earliest sources of low cost consumer goods for the West, such as footwear, and apparel produced for large retailers in the United States, but wages rose quickly in Japan, and these companies soon became intermediaries in more complex “triangle manufacturing” arrangements that brought factories in South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong into GVC fold (Gereffi 1999). Eventually, global buyers in the West learned how to buy directly from these factories, or from local intermediaries, as Japanese manufacturers stepped into their current role as suppliers of key components and technologies to later developers in East Asia.

As firms in Korea and Taiwan made their own moves to supply more technology intensive products, with help from the state, their paths diverged. By and large, Korean firms followed in Japan’s footsteps. The chaebol became large, diversified enterprise groups with a vertically integrated stance toward product development, manufacturing, and marketing. Their initial focus was on import substitution rather than exports, but they nevertheless followed the late development path quite closely. Today, using their own brand names, Samsung, LG and Hyundai Motors compete head to head with firms based in the United States, Japan and Europe in global markets for technology intensive products such as mobile phone handsets, flat panel television sets, and passenger vehicles.

In Taiwan, on the other hand, many manufacturers began (somewhat later) by supplying components and sub-assemblies, rather than finished products, but they sought, and indeed were asked and in some cases forced by global buyers and de-verticalized “manufacturers” in the West, to move up the value chain. As a result they began to assist with the design process and take full responsibility for component purchasing, final assembly, and the organization of multi-country supply-chains in East Asia. While Taiwanese firms eventually settled into their role as key suppliers in larger, border-spanning GVCs, they had long hoped to leverage this learning process to become fully blown “original brand manufacturers” selling their own brand of products in end markets. Few have been successful, however, in large part because doing so brought them into direct competition with their customers (small in number and very powerful), putting future orders at risk.Footnote 7 The fall-back for Taiwan-based suppliers was to remain within the expanding set of value chain niches that had been made available, and to increase their range of competencies in contract manufacturing and design services, while expanding geographically into mainland China in an effort to respond to customer demands for ongoing cost reductions. As a result, a different business model, and path to development, separates Taiwanese firms such as TSMC, Quanta, and Hon Hai from their South Korean “national champion” counterparts such as Samsung and LG.Footnote 8 The success of this model and the growing obstacles on path of late development eventually shifted Taiwan’s industrial policy away from efforts to create fully blown, vertically integrated, globally competitive national industries through a process of sequential value chain upgrading.

Mainland China: Modularity Traps and Value Chain Inversions

The allure of the “late development” model remains strong, and can be seen in mainland China’s attempts to nurture a group of former state owned enterprises as national champions (or a “national team”: cf. Nolan 2001; Sutherland 2003). Little progress has been made, however, and China has simultaneously followed a path of close engagement in GVCs, with its export sector driven by foreign financial, technological, and organizational resources. The success of this approach is underscored by the fact that nearly two-thirds of China’s manufactured exports come from foreign-invested firms.Footnote 9

What does this reliance on outside capabilities mean for development? On one hand, it has resulted in an unprecedented acceleration of industrialization. However, as was the case with Taiwan, once engaged, it can be difficult to move beyond low-value niches and to gain the autonomy and profits that can come with lead firm or platform leader (Gower and Cusumano 2002) status in GVCs. Song (2007) has shown how profits in China’s electronics industries have become very thin, despite massive increases in labor productivity, in what he calls a “Chinese-style modularity trap.”Footnote 10 Imai and Shiu (forthcoming) provide an example of this from the domestic Chinese mobile phone handset industry. From 1999 to 2003, the market share of local firms soared from 5% to 55%, but subsequently—and very suddenly—they lost this ground to multinational brands, notably Motorola and Nokia, as consumers began to expect handsets with color LCDs and increased functionality, such as MP3 music playback and cameras with both still and video capabilities. Local handset design houses did not have the competencies needed to bundle these new technologies in larger, more integrated design platforms, re-opening the window for the multinational brands, whose deep internal design and system integration capabilities, built up over many decades, allowed them to rapidly retake market share.

Such examples—given cursory attention by stage theory proponents—reveal the challenges and limits to industrial upgrading in global industries like mobile communications. On the other hand, there are a growing number of important exceptions—also insufficiently analyzed—that suggest that a new model of learning through close engagement in GVCs could be emerging, one with broader lessons for developing countries. Consider the case of Lenovo, the (partially) state-owned Chinese personal computer company. In the mid-1990s the company, benefiting from a protected market, emerged as the largest domestic producer of personal computers in China. As import restrictions were lifted, however, Lenovo struggled to remain competitive. After the bursting of the technology sector bubble in 2001, persistent low profitability in the global personal computer industry led some of the largest multinational producers to exit the industry, precipitating a wave of acquisitions, including Lenovo’s purchase of IBM’s huge personal computer division in 2004.

The purchase gave Lenovo a new headquarters in the United States with a large research and development facility, an advanced notebook computer development facility in Japan, three final assembly plants in China and one in India, regional distribution facilities in the Netherlands, Dubai, Florida, Australia, and India, and an important corporate planning, finance and business process development group in Singapore. The deal also came with a dense set of ongoing supply relationships, mainly with Korean, Taiwanese and American component producers and contract manufacturers, the largest with global operations, to provide main boards, microprocessors, memory, disk drives, monitors, LCD screens, keyboards, and contract manufacturing services.Footnote 11 Lenovo’s American CEO, based in Singapore, was a former Dell Computer executive. He led a management team with top executives from China, the United States, Europe, and India. While it would be wrong to portray Lenovo as something other than a China-based company, the structure, geography, ownership, leadership, supply-base, and sources of innovation at today’s Lenovo are vastly different from the national champions that emerged under Late Development. It is also a remarkable case of compressed development at the corporate level.Footnote 12

Lenovo is an example of a small but dynamic set of “dragon multinationals” (Mathews 2002) that include other Chinese firms such as Huawei (communications equipment) and Haier (home appliances and consumer electronics), as well as firms from countries as diverse as Mexico (Mabe—home appliances) and Turkey (Arçelik—home appliances). In India, the largest IT and business process services firms TCS, Infosys and Wipro, have all established global operations to serve local customers and to funnel work back to India. As Bonaglia et al. (2007) put it, “These new [multinational enterprises] did not delay their internationalization until they were large, as did most of their predecessors, and often become global as a result of direct firm-to-firm contracting. Many grow large as they internationalize; conversely, they internationalize in order to grow large” (2007: 3, emphasis in the original). These companies have become global by “rolling up” (purchasing) smaller regional producers with well known brands with funds generated not so much by selling products or services in their home markets, but by acting as suppliers to existing multinationals, tapping into international capital markets, and producing and selling globally.

Taking a different case from another key industry, Chery Automobile, a small state-controlled Chinese company based in Wuhu, some 200 km west of Shanghai, has been able to develop and market a line of Chery badged vehicles within a remarkably short time. Chery cars, while perhaps not world class, are nevertheless suitable for both the local market and for export to other developing country markets. The first Chery prototype was built in December 1999, and volume production began in March 2001. By the end of 2007 capacity had grown to 600,000 units, and Chery was already China’s largest vehicle exporter.

To grasp how remarkable this is, we need to understand a few details. Vehicle design and development are a notoriously difficult set of tasks, typically the purview of companies that have been in the business for 4–5 decades. New vehicle designs commonly require more than 30,000 engineering hours, 3–5 years to complete, and several billion dollars of up-front investment (Sturgeon et al. 2008). If a firm does enter the business, it usually comes from a field such as aircraft, where related design and engineering experience has been accumulated over a similarly long period (Mitsubishi, Subaru, BMW and SAAB are examples).

Chery has been able to launch its own line of branded vehicles in a very short time frame by tapping the new global supply-base, both within China and in the West, to obtain a full range of inputs, from parts to process technology to design expertise.Footnote 13 These sourcing arrangements, which have only recently become readily available for fledgling companies like Chery to piece together, show that Chery is nothing like a typical car company, and that it is far removed from the most recent entrants to the mass market for cars, the vertically integrated and horizontally diversified national champions from Korea; Hyundai, Kia and Daewoo. Companies that jump to the head of global value chains in this way, however, may still fail to develop deep design and system integration expertise that allow them to compete at the vanguard of fast-moving markets.

The examples we have provided here come from industries associated with different “stages” of development. They suggest that while the allure of the “late development” model remains strong, the allure of development through engagement with GVCs is proving even stronger. This does not mean, however, that this path is not without its own problems and “traps,” as we have noted.

The Human and Social Dimensions of Compressed Development

Economic and social development are fundamentally inter-linked. In recent years there has been a growing recognition of both the social dimension of development, and the role of social policy in promoting economic development, especially among late developers.Footnote 14 Citing Pierson (1998), Mkandawire (2001: 15) notes that: “(I)mplicit in late industrialization was social policy that served not only to ensure national cohesion (as is often asserted of Bismarck’s innovative welfare legislation), but also to produce the social pacts and the human capital that facilitated industrialization.”

This recognition extends to East Asia (Chang 2002b; Jomo 2003). Sen’s (1999a) East Asian model is characterized by: 1) an emphasis on basic education from the beginning of the development process, if not before; 2) wide dissemination of economic entitlements through education and training, land reform and credit availability; and 3) a deliberate combination of state action and use of the market. Human development is enabled by basic education and health care, creating social opportunities that “make it possible for the bulk of the people to participate directly in the process of economic expansion” (Sen 1999b: 5).Footnote 15 Like the economic model, East Asia’s social welfare model came under intense scrutiny and criticism in the wake of the Asian financial crisis for its reliance on informal practices and its vulnerability to corruption and external disruptions.

Compression and engagement in new production systems, moreover, create new challenges and dilemmas for compressed developers as features normally associated with different stages of development appear simultaneously. We cannot provide a comprehensive analysis of these economic and social interlinkages in this section. Instead we highlight challenges in health and education, and offer some comments on gender in compressed development.

Double Burden of Disease

Health may be considered a basic prerequisite for development. Under compressed development, however, the transition from under-nutrition and communicable diseases to over-nutrition and non-communicable diseases happens ever more quickly, and—as with simultaneous industrialization and de-industrialization—at lower levels of per capital income, to such an extent that the two can co-exist, not just in the same generation, but in the same household.

Nowhere is this “double burden of disease” (WHO 2006) dimension of compression more apparent than in China: “Preventable communicative diseases, which are common in low-income countries remain a significant cause of death, particularly among young children. In addition to this, driven by socio-economic and demographic transitions, chronic non-communicable diseases, which are common in high-income countries have become increasingly prevalent” (OWHORC/SDDC 2006: 11). On the one hand China is one of the WHO’s 22 “high burden” tuberculosis countries.Footnote 16 On the other hand, China is also home to an estimated one fifth of the world’s obese population. Driving the latter are dramatic changes in the working, leisure and eating habits of the burgeoning Chinese middle class (Popkin 2002; Prentice 2006).

Not only are non-communicative diseases costly to treat compared to infectious diseases, but the compression produces distinctive deleterious effects. Low weight infants develop problems with their metabolism that later increase risk of obesity when they are exposed to new diets and activity patterns (Hoffman et al. cited in Popkin 2002). These are problems which late developers such as South Korea and Japan did not experience because they had time to mobilize efforts to preserve the healthful elements of their traditional diets (Lee et al. 2002).

In developed countries there is typically a negative correlation between obesity and socio-economic status, while in countries like China there is a positive correlation. The rural poor have still not acquired the extra income to develop sedentary lifestyles and to consume more (animal) fat-rich food, and food prepared away from home. This is not the case among the growing numbers of urban middle class families, whose propensity to consume such food may be further exacerbated by recent memory of economic hardship, and an associated positive view of excess body weight.Footnote 17

Exacerbating this is the “early” domestic retail revolution, and sophisticated marketing and advertising techniques that come with it.Footnote 18 Supermarkets have rapidly become commonplace in countries like China (Hu et al. 2004). Access to the Internet increases exposure to online advertising and “advergames,” which frequently breach even minimal standards of regulation to protect children, as recognized by the International Obesity Taskforce’s call for an international code in 2006.Footnote 19 Thus compression serves as an inbuilt driver, amplifying the effects of changing diets, occupations and lifestyles.

Double Challenge of Education

Education is also a basic prerequisite for development, and here compressed developers face a double challenge, if not a double burden. At the same time as they are building (or consolidating) basic education, compressed developers are challenged with building (or securing) advanced knowledge and specialist skills necessary for engaging in modern production systems and global value chains, as described in “New Production Systems, Global Value Chains and Compressed Development”. The first challenge is expressed in China as the “two basics”—to promote and consolidate nine-year compulsory education, particularly in rural areas, as well as to eradicate illiteracy. While the proportion of children moving from primary to middle school has risen markedly, and may soon be effectively universal, the proportion completing middle school, and in particular going on to high school, is substantially smaller, especially among girls.Footnote 20

At the same time, the proportion of high school graduates going on to tertiary education in China has jumped dramatically, from just 4% of the 18–22 year old cohort in 1990 to 21% in 2005. Within tertiary education the number of students in Masters and Ph.D programs has increased even more dramatically (OECD/MoE 2007: 15; 17; also Gallagher et al. 2009). Thus there appears to be a bifurcation, with many students, especially in rural areas, leaving school at or before the end of middle school, and an increasing proportion of the remainder, especially in urban areas, completing high school and going on to tertiary education.

In consolidating its compulsory education system to promote economic and social development, China appears to be following the route of other East Asian late industrializers, such as Japan and South Korea. The huge expansion of tertiary education is happening comparatively earlier, however, and the expansion of postgraduate education, in particular, is happening at the same time as in Japan, at a time when half of the Chinese labor force is still engaged in agriculture!Footnote 21 Part of this might be credential inflation—the “diploma disease” (Dore 1976)—but it also reflects a new development path, including the need to engage with and work for foreign firms, and the drive for the development and commercialization of indigenous science and technology.

Just as we described simultaneous industrialization and de-industrialization earlier, here we see simultaneous education for (basic) development and education for (advanced) competitiveness and globalization. If the former is pursued without the latter, skills necessary for dynamic engagement and upgrading through GVC participation will be foregone. If the latter is pursued without the former, labor market participation opportunities will be lost, inequality and social tensions will increase, and social sustainability will be threatened.

Gender and Compressed Development

As Chang (2002a) has shown, legislation promoting gender equality has been passed earlier and earlier (in terms of per capita GDP) in later developers, often under pressure from international institutions and conventions. Creating gender equality, however, is an entirely different matter. The reality is that economic development processes are gendered, and have different outcomes for men and women. This applies even (or perhaps especially) to East Asian late developers, despite their relatively egalitarian income distribution. Numerically prominent in labor-intensive factories in early stages of industrialization, women became shadowy figures in the capital intensive stages of development (cf. Cho et al. 2004 on Korea; also Razavi and Pearson 2004), with only gradual improvements offered by the rise of service sector employment.

Is the situation any different under compressed development? It appears so. Compression exacerbates bifurcation. At a very basic level, the value placed on male babies for future productive and welfare reasons, commonly associated with pre-industrial societies, may not only persist, but be stimulated by (supposedly gender neutral) social policies seeking to limit population growth, and be amplified by modern medical technology, resulting in large numbers of “missing girls.”Footnote 22 Girls may also face discrimination over access to nutrition, medical treatment and education, magnifying gender differences. Almost three quarters of those illiterate in China are women (NBS 2004: 59).

On the other hand, there are growing numbers of women seeking advancement through education and work, drawn to the cities, or in the case of elites, going abroad for higher education. The rapid increase in Chinese tertiary education noted above, for example, is marked by an even higher increase on the part of women, from 35.4% of those registered in 1995 to 44.0% in 2002. The proportion of women among those registered for Masters degrees rose from 28.0% to 38.7%, and for Doctorates from 12.0% to 26.0%, over the same time (NBS 2004: 63). Surveys have also found high ratios of businesses with women in senior management posts, and high ratios of women senior managers.Footnote 23 Elite women who go abroad to study might either stay abroad, or return to work for foreign firms or for the “progressive” domestic businesses that interact closely with them through global value chains linkages.

One result of compression may well be an increase in gender-related social tensions. Overall, the relationship between human and social development on the one hand, and economic development on the other, becomes more complex in compressed developers, and compounds policy dilemmas.

Policy Stretch and the Adaptive State

Late developers created innovative approaches to industrial upgrading, capital mobilization and learning. The “developmental state” played an active role in orchestrating these processes. Structurally, the developmental state might have resembled a Weberian bureaucracy (Kim et al. 1995; Evans 1995; Evans and Rauch 1999), but functionally it was innovative. And, as recent neo-developmental state writing stresses, this innovation evolved through interactions within state-business networks. Indeed, explicit recognition is now given to the need for developmental states to be flexible (e.g. O’Riain 2000). As Bresnitz (2005: 6) points out, however, the developmental state’s main role is still seen as the “co-design and coordination of industrial development” in the classical sense. Our analysis, on the other hand, stresses a broader range of new challenges, which require even greater agility, as well as a different set of competences.

In the domain of economic or technological development, the compressed developer still has to promote technology diffusion and upgrading. But it faces a fundamental dilemma of whether to try to emulate the “late development” model (as it has now become), or learning and upgrading through engagement in GVCs, whose evolving dynamics are not necessarily well understood or fully under state control.Footnote 24 Pietrobelli and Rabellotti (2010) attempt to sketch a “technology system” of learning, diffusion and extension through GVC engagement, which takes into account the governance structures of GVCs (as laid out by Gereffi et.al.), as well as local diffusion mechanisms with an emphasis on MSTQ (metrology, standards, testing and quality). However, in an extension of the concept of forward and backward linkages to forward and backward learning, the compressed developer must also attempt to leverage learning associated with the multiple economic “stages” in which it is attempting to engage. This is even less well understood than GVC engagement.Footnote 25

In the domain of social and human development, as will be clear from the preceding section, a major task for the compressed developer is creatively addressing double burdens or challenges, which require a quite different kind of agility. In addition to education and health care, this is apparent in, for example, food policy. First, there is the classic issue of supplying food to burgeoning urban populations. Additionally, however, “advanced” food safety problems loom, such as microbiological contamination, linked to ever-lengthening food supply chains. Compressed developers face these problems earlier than NDCs, with fewer resources. Addressing them typically requires far-reaching inter-bureau policy co-ordination and mechanisms, as European states have found (e.g. Barling et al. 2002), which are more complex than the “nodal agencies” which enforce developmental state coordination (Chibber 2002).

While agility is required in all of these senses, there are new constraints. Developing countries are required to sign up to and implement a host of international treaties and initiatives that are now deemed essential for membership of the international community. Early and late developers did not confront these external pressures, or faced them at later stages of development. Some are neoliberal in nature, and elevate the rights of (global) capital providers over those of local stakeholders. Chang (2002a) has described them—after List—as “kicking away the ladder.” They should also be seen in the context of globalizing and homogenizing dynamics, fostered by “a welter of international governmental and non-governmental associations” which “share models of medicine, science, education, economic organization, human rights, environmental protection, technical development, rational political and social organization” (Meyer 2000: 241). While potentially benefiting from instruction in “proper actorhood,” the power of states to act independently, or differently—in addressing their simultaneous challenges—is curtailed.Footnote 26

The challenges are summarized in Table 2. The inevitable result is “policy stretch,” where the competencies of the state are distended by the dynamic and diverse nature of the challenges it faces. The state may be overwhelmed, or it may creatively adapt. Faced with gaps and inconsistencies, the tendency is for policymakers to scramble to plug them using a diverse set of actors, both domestic and foreign. Even in the domain of industrial development, “governing the market” (Wade 1990) has become more difficult with the diversity of actors and institutions—domestic, foreign, and multi-lateral—involved or potentially involved.

Table 2 Sources of policy stretch: challenges for compressed developers
Full size table

Referring to China, Howell (2006: 282) observes: “The profusion of competing terms to describe the Chinese state in the reform period, such as ‘developmental’, ‘entrepreneurial’, ‘corporatist’, ‘market-facilitating’, ‘regulatory’, ‘rent-seeking’, reflect not merely alternative explanations of state behaviors arising out of different normative and intellectual starting points, but, more significantly, highlight deeper problems of fragmentation in governance processes in a context of rapid economic and institutional change and heightened global integration.” In particular, she highlights regional diversity, and the nuances of the “state entrepreneurialism” in different regions, which illustrate the full range of Baumol’s (1990) distinction between productive, unproductive and destructive forms of entrepreneurship. In some cases, moreover, entrepreneurship “may be a misnomer, reflecting a desperate struggle to ride the tide rather than a coherent strategy of fostering local economic development” (Howell 2006: 287). Overall she describes the Chinese state(s) as “polymorphous,” falling between the developmental and predatory (or short-termist) poles.

Zhu (2010) sees China as a “flexible state,” in which flexibility in central-local government relations allows for experimentation and subsequent diffusion of successful formulae. Citing Qu (2009), he notes how certain local governments supported the development of the auto industry (especially the company Geely), in contradiction to the central government policy of forging joint ventures with foreign manufacturers, and that their success led to a change in central government policy. Such rule bending at the local level and pragmatic learning at the centre are key features of the flexible state. Breznitz and Murphree (forthcoming), too, argue that China has fortuitously evolved both a national (generally ineffective) and regional (more effective) innovation systems. The latter, in particular, facilitate learning and engagement in GVCs.Footnote 27

It appears that China has responded flexibly to some of the challenges of compressed development, although a broader framework encompassing human and social development is needed for a more comprehensive analysis.Footnote 28 We are not, however, proposing China as a “model.” In fact, to avoid confusion we refer to the state of the ideal-typical compressed developer as the “adaptive state.” What the flexible state has stumbled into, the adaptive state will seek to explicitly create. While the flexible state reluctantly accommodates new realities and successful experiments, the adaptive state works to promote experimentation, aggressively replicates successful results, and actively seeks to improve on them. The adaptive state is not encumbered by policy formulations from Late Development, such as a drive for vertical integration. It confronts policy stretch with agility, linking economic development with human and social development, and proactively addressing double burdens and challenges with limited resources. Indeed, it is likely to pursue an explicit complex systems approach to these challenges.

We will have to wait for a clearly successful compressed developer and adaptive state to emerge, and are aware that success stories may well be limited in number. Just as successful late developers tackled the challenges of their time, however, successful compressed developers will have tackled the challenges we have identified, and created new solutions. One encouraging point is that a huge internal market, which has accentuated GVC engagement in China, may not be necessary for the adaptive state to be successful, as the cases of Singapore and Taiwan suggest.

Concluding Comments

Late developers traveled different paths to industrialization than the earliest developers. In this paper we have argued that the development path is changing yet again, significantly enough for us to seek a different label to describe it. We propose “compressed development,” recognizing that all late development is compressed in the sense that it is accelerated, but that development in the context of deepening global integration introduces levels of simultaneity and international interdependency that are quantitatively and qualitatively different from those of archetypical late developers. As such, compression challenges the developmental state, whose efficacy will depend on how well policy makers are able to understand these new conditions, learn, seize opportunities, adapt, and develop innovative solutions in concert with a wide range of actors, domestic and foreign. This is best accomplished through the policies of the adaptive state rather than those of the classical developmental state.

There has been much reflection and criticism in recent years about Western-centric notions of development. NDCs have been accused of “kicking away” the ladder of development they themselves climbed, creating a distorted field for LDCs. At the very least, they struggle to understand the distinctive dilemmas associated with compressed development. By highlighting the lens of compression, we hope to generate interest and debate over these dilemmas. We have also sought to delineate a more objective and pragmatic ground between late development defensiveness on the one hand, and globalization evangelism on the other; a policy space that lies between state-led development and neo-liberal marketism. With compressed development the role of the state remains crucial, but it has become more complex and difficult than in the past.

The dynamics intensifying compression are powerful. Developers seeking to play “catch-up” are chasing a moving target. Science and technology-based innovation in NDCs have undergone “intensification” (Dodgson et al. 2005). Product cycle times have been drastically shortened through synchronization of inputs (Best 2001) extending back into R&D and forwards into sales and marketing. Global value chains facilitate these processes, but as also force NDCs to redouble their efforts as developing countries jockey for position and seek to claim a more significant stake over time.

The idea of compressed development, then, broadens the development debate to include not just dynamics within individual developing countries, but the global-scale business networks that draw in developing and developed countries alike. The policy challenge for the adaptive state is less one of “governing” domestic markets, and more one of riding the waves propagated by globalization without crashing into the foam. This difficult balancing act requires agility and a clear understanding of the forces at work.Footnote 29 The compressed development perspective enables us to analyze phenomena previously treated separately, such as industrial development, the “Double Burden of Disease,” and food safety. By bringing diverse phenomena together in the framework of compression, we can begin to appreciate the challenges that confront developing countries today, and to engage more constructively with them.