ABSTRACT

Since the end of the Cold War, an influential idea has taken hold of the development agenda and above all in the mainstream IPE: that a country can lift people out of poverty without promoting industrialization, and that whether in a developing or advanced setting, the state has a very limited role to play in the endless challenge of economic transformation. Our chapter questions this understanding by asking, first, whether there can be development without production and, second, to what extent the globalization of production reduces or sidelines the state’s developmental role. To set the scene, we first examine how both the state and production became marginalized in understandings in IPE of what it takes to grow the economy, lift people out of poverty, and pave the way for continuing prosperity. We then draw on recent research that shows why manufacturing production remains pivotal to economic prosperity, and how the state is still central to the development story, even gaining a potentially renewed importance now that economies are deeply intertwined.