Book reviews

MIDDLE EAST AND FAR EAST, Allan S. Walker, M.D., Ch.M., F.R.A.C.P. Published by the Australian War Memorial, Canberra. Obtainable at all booksellers, price 35/‐.

UNESCO, HUMANISM AND EDUCATION IN EAST AND WEST — Published in 1953 by the United Nations. 224 pages.

THE ALTERNATIVE (a dynamic approach to our relations with Asia). By John Burton, B.A., B.Ec., Ph.D., Sydney. Morgans Publications, 1954. PP. 116.

TING HSIEN — A North China Rural Community: By Sidney D. Gamble (Institute of Pacific Relations, New York, 1954). U.S. $6.50.

ZWISCHEN BEFREIUNG UND FREIHEIT. DER SONDERFALL OSTERREICH, by Karl Gruber. Verlag Ullstein. Wien, 1953.

AMERICAN ECONOMIC POLICY TOWARDS THE PHILIPPINES: By Shirley Jenkins — With an introduction by Claude A. Buss. Published under the auspices of the American Institute of Pacific Relations by Stanford University Press, California, 1954. P. 181.

THE ORIGINS OF PRUSSIA: By F. L. Carsten—Clarendon Press. Oxford, 1954. 309 pp., 1 map. (55/6 sterling).     

W Function: A New Distance‐Based Measure of Spatial Distribution of Economic Activities

Distance‐based methods are applied in various fields of research. In this paper, a new relative distance‐based method, the W function, is introduced. This method contributes to the assessment of spatial patterns of economic activities using the stochastic Monte Carlo simulation, and supplements the typology of distance‐based methods recently drawn up by Marcon and Puech. The capability of the W function is compared with results from the Kd and the recently defined m function methods, which are widely used for monitoring the spatial distribution of economic activities by considering several theoretical and empirical examples. The W function appears to provide more precise estimations of the density of economic activities compared to the m and Kd functions, particularly in cases of complex patterns such as double clustered distribution. It also appears to provide a more accurate evaluation of dispersion.     

Marxist Critiques of the Developmental State and the Fetishism of National Development

The developmental state has been heavily discussed in various disciplines and across diverse political spectrums. However, the statist notion formulated by institutionalists that the developmental state is autonomous from society and therefore effective in achieving “national development” has more often been taken for granted than problematised. The statist notion of the developmental state has also been accepted and reproduced or challenged merely inadequately by Marxist critics. By analysing how and why currently available Marxist assessments of the developmental state fail to challenge statism, this article offers an alternative theory of the developmental state by drawing on both social form critique and world system analysis. It then locates the origins of statism itself in the dynamics of global capitalism, in which the totality of capitalist social relations (understood as global from its inception) are hierarchically and unevenly constituted. From this it extends Marx's critique of commodity fetishism to the question of the international (the relationship between the nation state and world market) and criticises the statist notion of the developmental state from the perspective of a critique of the fetishism of national development.     

How China Navigated the Dilemma of Trade Liberalization and Government Revenues

Many economists believe that in the long run, the aggregate performance of open economies is better than that of closed ones, and that open policies contribute significantly to economic development. At the same time, many political scientists and policy makers fear that, in the short run, one of the steps towards openness — trade liberalization — may harm government revenues. However, in the 1990s, China successfully navigated the dilemma of trade liberalization and government revenues. In this period, China decreased tariff and non‐tariff barriers for WTO accession, but has achieved dramatically increased tariff revenues since 1999. This study explores how China implemented trade liberalization and simultaneously increased tariff revenues in the 1990s. It demonstrates that a series of institutional arrangements, including a reform of Criminal Law, rigorous anti‐smuggling activities and a de facto tax imposed on the export sector, successfully curbed smuggling activities through the processing trade, and made foreign‐invested manufacturing enterprises the major contributors to the stability of customs revenue. China's case shows that a prosperous, export‐oriented and foreign‐invested manufacturing sector could potentially provide a developing country with a source of customs revenue.     

From Getting the Development Question Wrong to Bringing Emancipation Back In: Re‐reading Alice Amsden

This article appraises Alice Amsden's theory of development. In particular, it focuses on Amsden's juxtaposing of the concrete and the universal, and the national and the global, as antithetical, and her prioritizing of the former over the latter. The author argues that this key feature of Amsden's work reduces the concept of development to a nationally determined process and empties capitalist development of its class content. It is argued that Amsden's primary focus on why and how development occurs in the Third World bypasses the question of what development is, thereby reinforcing ‘Third World developmentalism’, and removes the emancipatory content from the concept of development. Given the continued legacy of Amsden's theory, as evidenced in recent debates, and the inadequacy of extant Marxist critiques in addressing its conceptual and political problems, this article proposes an alternative conceptualization of concrete–general and national–global relations based on Marx's critique of political economy, and calls for the resuscitation of the emancipatory content of the concept of development.