Betting on Biotech: Innovation and the Limits of Asia's Developmental State
Joseph Wong
Abstract
After World War II, several late-developing countries registered astonishingly high growth rates under strong state direction, making use of smart investment strategies, turnkey factories, and reverse-engineering, and taking advantage of the postwar global economic boom. Among these economic miracles were postwar Japan and, in the 1960s and 1970s, the so-called Asian Tigers—Singapore, Korea, and Taiwan—whose experiences epitomized the analytic category of the “developmental state.” This book examines the emerging biotechnology sector in each of these three industrial dynamos. They have investe ... More
After World War II, several late-developing countries registered astonishingly high growth rates under strong state direction, making use of smart investment strategies, turnkey factories, and reverse-engineering, and taking advantage of the postwar global economic boom. Among these economic miracles were postwar Japan and, in the 1960s and 1970s, the so-called Asian Tigers—Singapore, Korea, and Taiwan—whose experiences epitomized the analytic category of the “developmental state.” This book examines the emerging biotechnology sector in each of these three industrial dynamos. They have invested billions of dollars in the biotech industry since the 1990s, but commercial blockbusters and commensurate profits have not followed. Industrial upgrading at the cutting edge of technological innovation is vastly different from the dynamics of earlier practices in established industries. The profound uncertainties of life-science-based industries such as biotech have forced these nations to confront a new logic of industry development, one in which past strategies of picking and making winners have given way to a new strategy of throwing resources at what remain very long shots. The book illuminates a new political economy of industrial technology innovation in places where one would reasonably expect tremendous potential—yet where billion-dollar bets in biotech continue to teeter on the brink of spectacular failure.
Keywords:
investment strategy,
global economic boom,
postwar economic boom,
postwar Japan,
Asian Tigers,
developmental state,
emerging biotechnology,
biotech industry,
political economy
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2011 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780801450327 |
| Published to Cornell Scholarship Online: August 2016 |
DOI:10.7591/cornell/9780801450327.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Joseph Wong, author
Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Political Science and Director of the Asian Institute, the Munk School of Global Affairs, the University of Toronto
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