Cumulative Forces Behind the Economic Development in East Asia and Sri Lanka's Development Experiences

This paper attempts to identify a process of cumulative reinforcements that sustained pro-growth state orientations and the other participants' motives for collaboration during the post World War II economic development East Asia. The process is elaborated in terms of the five parties who were engaged in it: political leader; ruling party; bureaucrats; industrialists; and aid donors/loan providers. Accordingly, the Developmental State is viewed as an entity that simultaneously governed the market and influenced by the growth process that it had accelerated. This helps us answer some of the criticisms leveled at the Developmental State literature such as: (a) its inadequate attention paid to where the pro-growth orientations came from; and (b) the Developmental State is an autonomous and time-less structure. In a latter part of the paper, the development experiences of Sri Lanka, a country from a totally different environment, is examined in the light of the framework developed in the first few parts