ABSTRACT
Why does a huge income gap still exist between developed and developing countries? How did Japan become the first advanced country outside the western world? Why has the economic performance of the Philippines and Indonesia been better compared with their higher-income neighbors, Malaysia and Thailand, in recent years? Why have South Asian countries, including India and Bangladesh, begun growing fast? On the surface, the income gap and different growth performance reflect the differences in technology, quality of human resources, and economic policies, but at the deeper level they reflect, in large measure, the success and failure of state building conducive to economic development. It is the contention of this volume that the issues raised above can be interpreted in a consistent manner within a broader analytical framework that subsumes the interactive processes between state building, contentious politics, and economic development.
