alice amsden, third world industrialization: global fordism or a new model?

(6): amount of exports and dollar price were all 'highly politicized outcomes'

(7): they got prices 'deliberately wrong

(9): global Fordism cannot explain how or why mass production came to the Third World--and why it came to some places, and not others. so no explanation for divergence within the Third World

(9): there's also the fact that multinational investment has been a small part of total capital formation--which means the story of core capital driving Third World industrialization is dubious

(10): Amsden alludes to 'failure of dependency theory'--what does she mean? distinct from the failures of 'global fordism' nonsense?

(10): in short, three problems with g. Fordism

1. underconsumption is not the stumbling block, rather raising productivity and becoming internationally competitive: r. wage rate increase is greatest in history in SK (pg. 11)
2. far more political process than Fordism would suggest: it's not just State autonomy that matters, but also long-term commitments and specific State policies; support for business has to be greater than infant industry protection
3. Taylorist nuances don't really explain differences in 'management': they don't just export American Taylorism to factories in E. Asia

(14): you get intensive regimes (relative surplus value) and extensive regimes (absolute surplus value) being employed side-by-side, unlike regulation school predictions

(14): imp--lateness in E. Asia is qualitatively different, insofar as the competitive disadvantages are starker (absence of novel technology)

(15): invention (England) --> innovation (Germany, USA) --> learning (E. Asia)

(16): key--late industrialization is the era of the 'subsidy' -- but the subsidy which incentivizes exports, rewards performance. much stronger than IIP, again.

(17): the central coordination offered by chaebols might be very important

(18): good management is critical [OK -- but why would we ever expect anything else? it seems like good management can be assumed, insofar as the correct incentive structure is in place]

(18): imp--cheap labour is very important (as is the repression of that labour), but it is not itself sufficient to drive growth rates (all late developers have repressed labour)

(18): Korea much, much more educated than Germany or England at analogous times in development history

(20): foreign investment not significant

(20-21): labour-intensity was not sufficient to defeat Japan in the 60s--had to turn to productivity increases

(20): this is exactly how Japan beat Lancashire in the early 1900s--not with lower wages, but with greater efficiency

(21-22): imp--the 'subsidy' has to be the disciplining mechanism (not small firms--there are a couple of enormous chaebols, remember; nor technology, a la Schumpeter--since this is largely a question of learning, not innovation)

(22): there is pervasive corruption, but the key is that it doesn't come at the cost of competitiveness

(23): State's power over investment is critical (suggestion that this can be thought of as 'democratizing') [hmm...]

(24-25): imp-- nor is it the fact of performance standards that matters (this is true in all Third World states). it is the capacity to impose them on producers [here there is a just-so story about how Korea got this capacity; very unsatisfying]

(28): a compact management structure, leading to a relative decline in the number of white-collar workers (different from US)

(29): imp--very rapid wage growth, telescoping advance of the core countries into a couple of decades [question: if the domestic market wasn't the primary driver of growth, what did these workers buy?]

(30): serious gender divide