Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
frontiers, and sometimes building monuments to dictators. Rarely was it policy to
help local people. From the command economies of China and Russia (Ch. 7),
the role of regional development is seen to be part of national strategy,
attempting to integrate distant regions into the centre. In India (Ch. 7) there were
efforts to spread development initiatives democratically, but this, in the context of
deep poverty and an expanding population, meant an ineffective weak gruel of
aid to too many regions.
The long debate over intervention missed out, however, a vital role for state
intervention to help regions or industries. As pointed out in
Chapter 8
, a major
success of the NICS has been in intervening, not to bolster up declining regions,
but to support new industries in the areas chosen by these industries, through
giving them export credits and designating them as specially protected industries
through the early stages of their growth. Intervention of this kind has positive
results, and leads to global competitiveness for these industries, allowing them to
kindle further growth in related industries within the country. There can be a
regional aspect to such policy, although not strongly exemplified in the countries
studied here, in moves to help regions that are responsible for the designated
growth industries.
There is always a need for care in such policies of intervention, and in the case
of the NICS, the protection and promotion was gradually reduced in the
successful industries, so that they remained as strong exporters to the rest of the
world based on their own efficiency. Early protection is followed by later
opening to the winds of competition.
The state is also justified in intervention in another way, in preparing a level
playing-field for a following development thrust. This could be through a sectoral
policy, such as that for agrarian reform as in Taiwan, or through the take-over of
domestic industries controlled by outside interests or by domestic monopolists
who run these industries inefficiently, as in most South American countries, or in
Russia at the time of the Communist Revolution of 1917. Temporary state
interventions of this kind, if they are not followed by too extensive a period of
state control as in the Russian case, may be beneficial in allowing a new start,
with new social actors. Beyond this, the state may be able to help regions, not
through regional or sectoral policy, but through macroeconomic policies, such as
the maintenance of a stable currency, a measure that reduces the risks to
entrepreneurs investing in new industries or new regions.
In summary, the case to be made is not totally for or against state intervention.
Instead, intervention needs to be selective, in time and space, and to be able to
retreat, either when statism threatens the strength of civil society so that there is
no further innovation or enterprise (Russia), or when the competitiveness of
industries is likely to be reduced through the creation of an artificially protected
environment, as in the UK or in India since the Second World War.
