 Growing Public? Explaining the Changing Economic Role of the State in Asia over the 20th CenturyAnne Booth No 2011-8, CEI Working Paper Series from Center for Economic Institutions, Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University Abstract: This paper surveys some of the recent literature on the role of the state in economic history, paying particular attention to the concepts of the contractual, predatory, regulatory and developmental states and their application to the study of economic development. The paper then relates that literature to the Asian experience over the 20th century. It is argued that neither the concept of the night watchman nor that predatory or extractive colonial state as a cause of continuing underdevelopment in many parts of the tropical world is entirely satisfactory in the Asian context. By the early twentieth century, there was a growing recognition in most colonies that colonial administrations had a responsibility to improve living standards of the indigenous populations. The paper examines the consequences of this recognition for colonial revenue and expenditure policies, and also for the role of government in the post-independence era in Asia. Keywords: predatory; colonialism; developmental state; government expenditure; tax policy (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hit:hitcei:2011-8 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in CEI Working Paper Series from Center for Economic Institutions, Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University Contact information at EDIRC. |
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