ABSTRACT
The territorial perspective of the central-local interaction has been absent in the classic developmental state model. The reason could be that small countries (or areas) like Singapore and Hong Kong did not leave room for local governments to play a part in economic development. However, Muramatsu Michio, a Japanese scholar, has pointed out that Japan may be different, and the assumption of a vertical control model by the administration in Japanese politics is false. He has argued that: “The economic development of postwar Japan began at the local level in the form of local development policy.” Therefore, “the horizontal political competition” should be addressed, since “an interdependent relationship model of the Japanese central-local relationship” is more appropriate (Muramatsu 1997, 35). Since systematic studies on the central-local relationship in other East Asian Newly Industrialized Economies (NIEs) are not easy to get, it is difficult to judge to what extent this conclusion also applies to them. But we can safely say that the neglect of the central-local interaction by the original developmental state model has been challenged and probably will become increasingly problematic if more studies are undertaken that focus upon the central-local dimension.
