States, Markets & Development

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

Market-oriented reforms known as ‘neoliberalism’ have dominated the reform agenda across the world. These reforms were passed amidst tremendous political contestations and have delivered varying degrees of success. For the developing countries that faced the additional/simultaneous challenges of building ‘good’ institutions and governance systems, these reforms have resulted in questionable outcomes. Given this, today’s emerging economies have been forced to re-assess the benefits of market-oriented reforms, and those with policy space and political will/capacity have embarked on new reform experiments. The module introduces the students to the complexities and challenges of economic reforms in the fast-growing economies by placing politics at the heart of the analysis. The course is comprised of two parts. The first part provides the theoretical and conceptual foundations for examining the processes and outcomes of economic reforms. It discusses the limitations and dangers of designing and implementing reforms without consideration of the broader concept of states and markets or sufficient engagement with politics. This is because policy always produces new winners and losers, and as a result provokes resistance from those who believe they will lose wealth, status, or power. The second part investigates reforms in key areas of the political economy where there have been significant reforms and where distributive tension and conflicts are rampant. These include privatization, trade liberalization, industrial policies, debt and macroeconomic stabilization, tax and fiscal, and social policy reforms, food and nutrition, among others. Given the importance of national and regional contexts when discussing politics, the course draws cases from a wide range of geographical areas including East Asia, Latin American and Sub-Saharan Africa. The module concludes by examining the implications of factoring politics and local contexts into economic reforms for development policy and management and discusses whether new development paradigms and models exist for emerging economies.