Successes or Failures of ‘Developmental’ Policies, Rent and Conditionality: Comparing Russia and Sub-Saharan Africa

TL;DRAbstract

Since the 1980s, the development strategies adopted by many emerging countries have gone against ‘orthodox’ policies and been subsumed under the concept of the ‘developmental state’, which was inspired by the experience of East Asian states. The paper evaluates this concept of developmental policies and investigates the conditions that lead to their success or failure, in particular the existing relationships between states and markets, through a comparison between examples from post-communist Russia and Sub-Saharan African states since the 1980s onwards. The paper shows that Asian policies have been developmental because they could meet two conditions - national economic guidance and industrialisation -, which explains their success. It demonstrates that though for different reasons, they were met neither by Sub-Saharan African states nor Russia. This comparison shows the importance of causal channels and constraints that have so far remained under-investigated by the literature on de

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