East Asia has delinked – can Ethiopia delink too?

ABSTRACT

The possible emergence of a developmental state in Ethiopia has renewed the debate among African activists, scholars and policymakers over how to explain the remarkable success of the ‘East Asian model’. Rapid industrialisation in South Korea, Taiwan and China supposedly invalidates dependency theory, yet Samir Amin’s framework of delinking can better explain the success of these countries than can competing theories of the developmental state, since it highlights the role of international and domestic political alliances. Delinking means submitting international trade and financial relations to domestic priorities and is necessary for capitalist or socialist development.

RÉSUMÉ

L’émergence possible d’un État développemental en Éthiopie a relancé le débat entre les activistes, les universitaires et les décideurs africains sur la manière d’expliquer le succès remarquable du « modèle d’Asie de l’Est ». L’industrialisation rapide de la Corée du Sud, de Taïwan et de la Chine est censée invalider la théorie de la dépendance, mais le cadre théorique de Samir Amin sur la déconnexion peut mieux expliquer le succès des ces pays que les différentes théories concurrentes de l’État développemental, car il met en évidence le rôle des alliances politiques internationales et nationales. La déconnexion équivaut à la subordination des relations commerciales et financières internationales aux priorités nationales et est nécessaire à la fois pour le développement capitaliste ou socialiste.

KEYWORDS:

• Delinking
• dependency theory
• Samir Amin
• East Asia
• developmental state
• industrial policy

MOTS-CLÉS:

• Déconnexion
• théorie de la dépendance
• Samir Amin
• Asie de l’Est
• État développemental
• politique industrielle

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven, Ushehwedu Kufakurinani, Maria Dyveke Styve and the three anonymous referees for their helpful comments. I am also grateful to my in-laws and partner whose care for our infant son allowed me to write this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Amin rejects the label of ‘dependency,’ preferring to describe the social and economic system in peripheral economies using the terms more common among Asian and African Marxists: ‘neocolonial’ or ‘comprador capitalism’ (1990, 9). Amin argues that to use the term ‘dependency’ is confusing because certain countries can be dependent but not peripheral. Canadian capitalists, for example, are deeply dependent on US markets, but since Canadian workers have similar wage and productivity levels to American workers, Canada is not a peripheral economy. Nevertheless, ‘dependency’, as used by Latin American structuralists and Marxists, has become the more popular term in English (1990, 17).

2 Amin notes that neoclassical economic theory assumes workers are free to move internationally to seek higher wages (1990, x).

3 This study, like many others, excludes Hong Kong and Singapore since as city-states their prospects for economic development in the 1960s were different.

4 Amin also rejects the notion proposed by ‘world-systems analysis’ of a semi-periphery (Wallerstein 2004; Lee 2009; Karatasli 2017), preferring instead to speak of peripheries in the plural. He contends that what matters is whether a nation-state is central or not, and that dividing the periphery into two or more groups is simply arbitrary. Classifying subgroups of the periphery according to GDP per capita is often misleading. Amin points to the examples of Italy, Japan and Ghana in the 1960s, which were all middle-income countries, but while Italy and Japan were on their way to central status, Ghana was not (Amin 1992, 189).

5 Amin contends that often case studies claiming to disprove dependency theory instead provide great descriptions of peripheral capitalism (1990, 110–111).

6 Data from UNESCO Institute for Statistics. Accessed 13 August 2019. http://data.uis.unesco.org.

7 Rwanda is often mentioned as another possible candidate, but Amin’s framework suggests that it is not delinking. Rwanda’s development plan is centred on exporting services – information and communications technology and tourism – not industrialisation like Ethiopia (United Nations 2016, 107–109).

8 World Bank Data. Accessed 1 November 2020. https://data.worldbank.org/country/ethiopia.

9 UN World Food Programme web page on Ethiopia. Accessed 9 September 2020. https://www.wfp.org/countries/ethiopia.

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Francisco Pérez

Francisco Pérez researches the history and political economy of currency unions. He has published on the crisis in the eurozone and is currently examining the debates on how to reform the CFA franc.