Introduction: The Nexus of Developmental Policy and State Building

Life of the “developmental state” concept has its ups and downs. Its heyday had lasted from the mid-1980s until the Asian financial crisis broke out in the late 1990s. Many analysts considered that it would face almost certain death following that crisis, during which the term “developmental state” seemed to connote “crony capitalism”. Nonetheless, its flagging fortune has been revived again in the wake of the global financial crisis of 2007–08, as the so-called Washington Consensus, with an opposing emphasis on deregulation and liberalization, is subject to growing criticisms (Helleiner 2010; Birdsall and Fukuyama 2011). Meanwhile, the Beijing Consensus, reminding most observers of the developmental state concept, has attracted increasing attention worldwide (Halper 2010). More fundamentally, however, renewed interest in the developmental state is due to the fact that the debate itself focuses on questions that are unlikely to easily fade into insignificance, that is, the relationship between the state, the market and civil society as well as the political and institutional foundations for long-term economic development (Hayami and Aoki 2001; Haggard 2015).