Hvygens@Hvygens
This is too strong, I think, with respect to industrial policy tout court. There are any number of examples of successful industrial policy that don't involve labour repression. The development of the high-tech sectors in Israel and Ireland are two that spring to mind.
But for economy-wide developmentalism, I believe it's basically correct. Capital-intensive growth necessarily implies high investment rates which, at some point, means high savings rates and hence restrained consumption. A developmentalist growth regime therefore needs a mechanism that restrains current distributive claims and channels surplus, labour, finance, and skills toward accumulation, upgrading, and external competitiveness.
A developmental state can squeeze landlords, banks, importers, and even industrialists, but it cannot make accumulation subordinate to immediate distribution. Capital-intensive growth requires a larger share of current output to be saved and invested rather than consumed; if that priority is reversed, the developmental project eats its own seed corn. Ultimately, then, someone’s consumption claim has to be restrained somewhere, at some time, if an economy is going to sustain very high capital accumulation. And since labour income is by far the largest factor claim on national income, and wages the main source of mass consumption, the incidence of that shift cannot fall only on narrow rentier groups.
In this sense, I think it's worth thinking about factor endowments and the restraints they imply and, also, the political coalitions they can generate.
Argentina is a very large country, relative to its population, with plentiful natural resources. Most notably, of course, the agricultural surplus generated by the humid pampas, but also energy like oil and gas. These resources generate rents, which can be used internally or utilised to generate the foreign exchange required to purchase imported goods.
As a stylised description, Peronism exists to capture these rents and transfer them to the urban working class. The methods include tariff protection to create a very large, labour-intensive, capital-light industrial base; microeconomic distortions, such as export taxes and restrictions, that serve to disconnect internal from international prices; subsidised energy and water tariffs; and, of course, social welfare expenditure and clientelistic public employment.
Under early Peronism, the country's chief exports (beef and wheat), were also central urban consumption goods, which made redistribution toward urban workers directly conflict with rural exporters and the balance of payments. With soy becoming the principal export, this changed, since soy is not directly consumed by the urban working class, but it could still be taxed to finance populist programmes. (Peronist political coalitions tend to fracture when commodity prices fall, which puts at least a temporary halt on the extension of the model.)
In this sense, Perón didn't need his industrial base to be globally competitive. The rents from the land subsidised the inefficiency of the factories.
The East Asian nations, being much more densely populated and relatively lacking in agricultural and energy resources, had no such natural bounty to draw upon. Japan had just lost a war fought in large measure to secure access to energy supplies and other raw materials, and in its aftermath faced severe scarcity. In 1946, exacerbated by the repatriation of millions of soldiers and civilians from the former empire, food supplies became so tight that official rations in Tokyo covered only a fraction of monthly needs, forcing many people to travel to the countryside to barter clothing and household goods for food. Starvation was a real risk for anyone unable or unwilling to rely on the black market; shortages triggered mass protests; and an acute lack of coal checked industrial recovery. Japan therefore depended heavily on American aid simply to feed the population and restart production. The same was broadly true of Korea in the 1950s and, to a lesser extent, Taiwan after 1949: both faced severe foreign-exchange constraints and both were heavily dependent on aid from the United States. Neither, meanwhile, possessed anything like Japan’s prewar and wartime industrial base.
Therefore, in order to generate the foreign exchange needed to pay for imports, including food, energy and other raw materials, as well as the capital goods required for industrial development, they had no choice but to export manufactured goods. Indeed, "exports are the only way to survive" ("수출만이 살 길이다") was one of the mantras of the Park Chung Hee era.
And an export orientation necessarily imposes restrictions. Domestic consumers have little choice but to pay high prices for mediocre manufactured goods under import protection, but the same is not true for the major export markets in the developed countries. If an American or Western European consumer didn't think a radio, television, motorbike or car represented good quality and good value for money, they simply wouldn't buy it. If you want to sell to their markets, you have no choice but to compete. You can't fool a foreign consumer with political connections or regulatory capture, and even if you impose restrictions on imports, foreign demand imposes a hard quality-to-price test that domestic protection cannot evade. And, for the likes of South Korea and Taiwan, if you don't export, your economy collapses.
This has clear consequences for the feasible set of public policies, particularly for a non-democratic regime that legitimates itself by economic growth. As Donald Keesing explained back in 1967:
"Reliance only on the domestic market permits a high degree of government intervention, whether in Soviet or Latin American fashion. By contrast, an outward-looking strategy compels moderation. If governments are serious about exporting manufactures, their freedom to intervene is restricted by the exigencies of keeping manufactures internationally competitive, and by trade conventions and sanctions that limit permissible methods of trade promotion."
The global market, effectively, acts as a constraint and impartial arbiter of the effects of state intervention. Taiwan simply couldn't afford to have bad industrial policy or "infant" industries that never grow up. Notably, even in Korea, the most interventionist of the East Asian developmental states, Westphal and Kim (1982) found that import restrictions and export-promotion measures largely offset each other, creating something close to a free-trade environment for manufacturing exports.
Argentina, by contrast, could muddle through for decades, punctuated by periodic crises, because the pampas kept generating foreign exchange regardless of manufacturing and industrial performance. There was a great deal more ruin in Argentina, to paraphrase Smith.
This doesn't, of course, mean that labour repression in East Asia was inevitable. But it does mean that the East Asian nations could not have followed a Peronist-style economic strategy even if they'd wanted to, at least not without staying mired in the most abject poverty. Their factor endowments and balance-of-payments constraints prevented it, at least once American aid began to be wound down.
We can say that endowments and geography set the range of institutional possibilities, while political agency and contingency then determine which possibility is selected. But as you build up an export-oriented industrial economy, the interest groups and political coalitions that sustain you in power are necessarily very distinct from those in an import-substituting economy that earns foreign exchange from exporting natural resources.
Argentina's factor endowments, on the other hand, made a redistributive, import-substituting coalition politically viable and, once the Peronist coalition was established, this generated institutional lock-in that made lasting reform of the political-economic regime very costly, even as the case for it became clear.