ABSTRACT
In Chapter 9, Nicolas Grinberg offers an alternative account to the mainstream, institutionalist view on the state-led process of economic development in Brazil and South Korea. Focusing on the development of the Brazilian and Korean steel industries, Grinberg claims that the specific form of participation of each economy in the production of relative surplus-value on a global scale has determined both the pattern of industrialization that followed, and the political processes through which it came about. In Brazil, industrial capital has accumulated through the state-mediated recovery of ground-rent, which has implied small-scale production for protected domestic markets. By contrast, in South Korea industrial capital has accumulated through the exploitation of a relatively cheap and disciplined workforce performing simplified activities for world market production in increasingly complex sectors. The significance of Grinberg’s analysis for us is that, while South Korea’s ‘take-off ’ is often used to refute the original NIDL thesis, the Korean case actually vindicates the revised version of the NIDL thesis put forward by this book.
KEYWORDS: Steel Manufactring Industry; Brazil; Korea; International division of labour