The purpose of this book is lofty: to understand the causes of economic development of the entire world. To be more specific, the study examines 91 countries outside Europe shaped by the colonial experience of the past 500 years. Krieckhaus looks at political science theories of ideology, bureaucracy, class, and education, as well as at economic theories of property rights and central policies. One of his first conclusions is that the settler counties of North America, the Cone of South America, and Australasia are far wealthier than the others. He goes on to examine the varying effects of different colonial powers, such as Portugal, Spain, France, or Britain, and whether the end of colonialism came in the nineteenth century or more recently.
Krieckhaus next analyzes data on the 91 countries using regression, finding in his optimal model for 1960 that income, health, education, property rights, and climate explain 65% of the variance (p. 67). In a disappointment for political scientists, he finds government policy less important. The author continues to examine the effects of colonialism, which contrary to much of the literature, are not strong. He describes the defensive modernization by Japan and, to a lesser extent, Thailand during the nineteenth century. Japan went on to colonize Korea and Taiwan.
The second half of the book has case studies of Mozambique, South Korea, and Brazil. He blames the failure of Mozambique on the Portuguese for exploiting agriculture, ignoring education, and blocking native leaders. War with South Africa was a further blow. The Korean chapter is remarkable in that Krieckhaus believes Japanese colonialism strengthened the government, fostered education, improved health, trained bureaucrats, encouraged native businesses, and constructed railways, hydroelectric dams, and industry. This contrasts with the conventional analysis that blasts the Japanese as ruthless exploiters. Brazil, where Portuguese colonialism ended in 1822, did well economically until the 1980s, when barriers to international trade, combined with excessive borrowing led to hyperinflation and currency collapse.
In his grand analysis, Krieckhaus reaches several conclusions. He notes that the primary advice given to developing nations today is to liberalize their markets. They are urged to adopt free trade, privatize, deregulate, and reduce governmental spending. This is labeled the Washington Consensus. To the contrary, the author finds that these policies have no clear effect on growth. One conclusion he does reach is that countries can make policy mistakes, such as the Mozambican overvaluation of the exchange rate during the 1970s. He goes on to observe that many so-called mistakes are really the result of outside factors such as the oil crises or extremely high international interest rates. The worst outside factor is war. Overall, developing countries have less control over their fates than is commonly assumed. The industrial world could help in several ways. The first would be more foreign aid, and the second would be to reduce tariffs, especially against farm products.
Krieckhaus has several good insights about the effect of war as a statistical variable. Standard data sets often lack information. For example, the Penn World Tables omit Vietnam during the period of the war there. No one knows the figures for economic growth, life expectancy, primary school enrollment, and so forth. Common sense says that all these were harmed, but by how much? The lack of data means these negative factors are ignored. Iraq is another country missing information. Its war with Iran from 1980 to 1988, its unsuccessful invasion of Kuwait and the Gulf War, and its invasion by the United States in 2003 all harmed the economy. But again, by how much?
Dictating Development has many good features. To paraphrase Lord Kelvin, unless you can measure something and express it in numbers, your knowledge is meager. Krieckhaus has certainly measured and expressed economic development in numbers. It is grand theory that can both inform and be debated by others willing to do similar statistical analysis. The author has agreed to make his data set available to other scholars for replication and testing. However, another researcher might use different starting dates or different factors and come up with different results.
The three case studies are a second good feature. Each ties the grand statistics of 91 countries to a single country. The cases consider elements such as government capacity, health, education, savings, and so forth in parallel. Unfortunately, modern publishing costs seem to dictate that scholarly books are limited to about 200 pages. This one would benefit from being twice as long with four or five more case studies. Finally, having the same author is a positive feature. Too often books of this sort are edited anthologies where the case studies by different authors do not mesh very well.
