Review article: Reflections on compressed development: Time and timing in economic and social development

Abstract

Hugh Whittaker, Timothy Sturgeon, Toshie Okita, and Tiambiao Zhu propose a new way to approach comparative international development. They distinguish their theory from earlier development theories and develop a two-level historical analysis of the capitalist economy focusing on time and timing. Timing refers to the differences in historical periods in which development takes place. Time refers to the pace of development in the empirical analysis of individual capitalist economies using models created in concrete historical settings. “Time” is accelerated such that sequential processes experienced earlier have given way to simultaneous processes. In their empirical analysis they pay special attention to the relation between Economic and Social Development. They find that the Fordist development model in the embedded liberalism era had a virtuous loop between economic and social development. This virtuous loop disappeared in the subsequent neoliberal era to which the compressed development model applies where economic change is taking place both at a much faster rate and in an international context that allows states far less control. The two-level historical analysis shows that the problem with stagist development models is that they generalise past development in a particular historical era as a general tendency. It also shows that institutions are shaped by the context in which they emerge, and they may subsequently prove difficult to change, even if the environment changes. In the last few years, the Japanese Political Economy has covered similar topics in its special issues. The present issue provides a good opportunity to review and compare my and their approaches and achievement. I found the concept of capitalist world systems complement their theory. Many of the difficulties in the compressed development era relate to the approaching second interregnum. Solving the difficulty in the compressed development era requires the creation of a new stable world system.

Notes

1 The development eras correspond to Perez’s periodisation of capitalismas follows: (1) and (2) Early development (the 1780s–1840s), (3) Early late development (the 1850s–1930s), (4) Late-late development (the 1945–1980s), and (5) and (6) Compressed development (1990–).

2 Whittaker (2021) further elaborates on Japanese secular stagnation.

3 Sukti Dasgupta et al. (2017) observed that “some of the changes observed in employment shares and productivity contributions might be derived from the separation of manufacturing and service activities within a firm, due to the fragmentation of firms’ internal organization.”

4 HWs point out that “industrialization has become ‘thin’ in terms of employment share, sectoral linkages, and sectoral span.”