The 2008 crisis revealed persistent socioeconomic cleavages between world-leading and peripheral countries, the group of late industrializing countries that have transitioned from mid- to high-income economies since the 1980s. Asymmetries between core and peripheral countries fuel political extremism and undermine the sense of solidarity and interdependence necessary to address cross-national economic, environmental, and security challenges.
Attenuating the persistent socioeconomic gap between core and peripheral countries will be contingent on the ability of peripheral countries to generate sustainable economic growth. Unfortunately, there is no silver bullet to achieve this. Recent approaches based on the transplantation of “international best practices” have proven ineffective, if not counterproductive. The neoliberal strategy, with its focus on firm-driven impetus and minimal state intervention, highlights the agency of firms but overestimates their ability to undertake risky and costly transformations autonomously. Alternative approaches based on bolstering state coordination can be potentially fruitful. However, the recent Western state-centric scholarship is based on the identification of gaps in the production and institutional structures of world-leading countries, which differ from those of peripheral countries. In contrast with these literatures, this talk discusses the main lines of an argument that addresses economic transformation in peripheral countries through a direct analysis of their contexts and needs. My research also seeks to break the dichotomy between the firm-centric and state-centric literatures by focusing instead on state-firm interactions, their evolution over time, and their impact on institutional reconfigurations and upgrading strategies. The analysis is based on a comparative study of the two largest peripheral economies, Spain and Korea, and their transformation from mid- to high-income economies between 1985 and 2011. It traces the dynamics of state-firm interactions in light of five variables: the rise of emerging economies, the influence of world-leading role models, internal political challenges, economic conditions, and the quality of the bureaucracy.
Speaker: Angela Garcia Calvo, RCC fellow
Sponsor: RCC
