ABSTRACT
The growth of the public sector since the 1930s has occurred in varied circumstances internationally. In the advanced industrial capitalist economies of Europe and, to a lesser extent, in North America, the growth of the public sector has been largely associated with the growth of the Welfare State, especially under the influence of social democratic movements and Keynesian economic ideas. However, in the Third World, the public sector has developed most under so-called ‘intermediate regimes’ often established by populist nationalist movements (for example, Sukarno’s Indonesia, Nasser’s Egypt, Nehru’s India), statist capitalist governments using state intervention and ownership to achieve rapid economic growth in favour of the ruling interests (for example, Suharto’s Indonesia, Marcos’s Philippines, and Malaysia under the NEP in South-East Asia), as well as politically beleaguered resource-poor regimes which intervened to ensure rapid industrialization for economic and political survival (for example, Park Chung Hee’s South Korea, Taiwan under the Kuomintang, and Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore).
