MITI and the Japanese miracle

Page 305

Nine

A Japanese Model?

The history of the modern state has been one of continuous enlargement of the state's functions. From its traditional concern with defense, justice, and communications, it has expanded to encompass education; physical, mental, and moral health; birth control; consumer protection; ecological balance; the elimination of poverty; and, ultimately, in totalitarian social systems (as the term implies), the attempt to eliminate the distinction between state and society. In totalitarian systems the state tries to do everything. We began this book by distinguishing between the regulatory state and the developmental state, but these hardly exhaust the functions of the state in the late twentieth century. Today there are welfare states, religious states, equality states, defense states, revolutionary states, and so forth. All of this is a way of saying that the innumerable things a state does can be arranged in rough rank order according to its priorities, and that a state's first priority will define its essence. It is possible, of course, that these priorities will change, thereby changing the nature of the state, and that in some periods a confusion in priorities will cause different parts of the state to operate at cross-purposes.

The effectiveness of the Japanese state in the economic realm is to be explained in the first instance by its priorities. For more than 50 years the Japanese state has given its first priority to economic development. This does not mean that the state has always been effective in achieving its priorities throughout this period, but the consistency and continuity of its top priority generated a learning process that made the state much more effective during the second half of the period than the first. Some of the Japanese state's policies for economic