This is a limited free preview of this book. Please buy full access.
of four critical factors: availability of adequate skilled labor and specialized infrastructure, proemployer labor and policy reforms, ethnic linkages of immigrant professionals abroad who returned to establish firms in their native states, and their existing technological capabilities at the beginning of reforms. In a liberalizing economy, these states provided specialized infrastructure and skilled labor, implemented proemployer policy reforms, attracted expatriate professionals, and facilitated production and marketing linkages between the local firms and foreign markets. This allowed the local firms to exploit opportunities due to increasing vertical specialization by firms in the developed economies. While the influence of dominant-class coalitions consisting of industrialists and professionals in Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh ensured the success of these policies, the relatively autonomous nature of the state in Kerala, its lack of genuine labor and policy reforms, its distrust of large private enterprises, and its focus on redistribution rather than growth prevented it from achieving similar success. Contrary to common explanations in the literature, the state did not play a significant role in providing specialized research and development (R&D) or finance to the industry.
This book is a very significant contribution to our understanding of the different strategies and options available to developing regions in supporting the growth of high-technology-based industries and making them competitive globally. The “competitive flexibility” model developed by the author tries to capture the essential elements of these strategies and shows that increasing globalization offers tremendous opportunities for developing regions to pursue appropriate development strategies to become globally competitive in a technologically sophisticated field.
—Professor Alice H. Amsden, MIT, Cambridge, MA