China's Trapped Transition_ The Limits of Developmental Autocracy - Minxin Pei [21]
But Evans’s explanation of why some states are nurturers while others are predators addresses only part of the puzzle. His formulation of the “embedded autonomy” of the state—the idea that developmental states gain autonomy and efficacy only when they arc “immersed in a dense network of ties that bind them to societal allies with transformational goals”—provides a useful answer, but appears to restate the well-known: states counterbalanced by strong societal coalitions are less likely to be predatory.61 Such explanations, built on the perspective of state-society relations, fail to probe the internal organizational dynamics and norms of the state. While few would deny the desirability and benefits of having strong societal forces committed to economic development, the most important challenge in the real world is that, in the overwhelming majority of developing countries, such forces are extremely weak or absent altogether. The transformativc project has to begin inside the state.
Yet, there is another conundrum: as some scholars have argued, no evidence exists to show that institutions can be devised to make the state an effective protector of property rights, but at the same time prevent it from abusing its power. In other words, there is no guarantee that the same helping hand will not become a grabbing hand.62
Indeed, as the experience of most developing countries shows, states as helping hands are the exception. Sustained developmental successes probably number fewer than ten, with most of them concentrated in the East Asian region.63 At the same time, predatory states have caused disastrous failures in a majority of poor countries, the most egregious examples being the Philippines under Marcos, Zaire under Mobutu, and Haiti under the Duvaliers. As the collapse of the Indonesian economy in 1997-1998 demonstrates, without adequate institutional controls imposed on predatory states, even initial successes could end up as catastrophic failures.
The Theory of the Predatory State
In its simplest formulation, the theory of the predatory state is based on a conception of the state as a grabbing hand. It envisions the central role of the state as the expropriation of wealth from society through taxes for the preservation of the state’s own power.64 The recent growing appeal of the theory is due, in large part, to the application of the institutionalist approach to the research on the relationship between political institutions and economic performance.65 The revival of institutionalism has again elevated the role of the state in economic development.66
To be sure, the institutionalist perspective on the state differs from that of the developmental state, which, as popularized by scholars of East Asia, has a direct role in correcting market failures. Institutionalists see the state as the provider and enforcer of rules and norms that underpin market transactions. This distinction is significant because the perspectives on the state behind it are fundamentally different. Unlike the helping hand envisioned in the developmental state perspective, the state is seen by institutionalists as a force both for good and evil. As Douglass North puts it, “The existence of a state is essential for economic growth; the state, however, is the source of man-made economic decline.”67 Although the state may be a helping hand that specifies and protects efficient property rights, it can also be a grabbing hand that expropriates the wealth of its people.68
The grabbing-hand perspective appeals to students of development because the theory of the predatory state provides a persuasive explanation for the weakness of the state and the overall poor performance of government. In applying this perspective, however, we need to make the distinction between centralized predation and decentralized predation because such a distinction is crucial to understanding the different dynamics behind a state’s institutional performance. In the earlier formulations of the theory