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Senior Research Affiliate, Industrial Performance Center (IPC), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), sturgeon@mit.edu.

Short Bio

Currently Tim is co-principle investigator (with UC Berkeley’s Clair Brown) of the National Survey of Organizations to Study Globalization, Innovation and Employment; funded by the National Science Foundation.  He held a Research Fellowship at the Institute for Technology, Enterprise, and Competitiveness (ITEC) at the Doshisha Management School in Kyoto, Japan from 2003 to 2007, and served as coordinator of the MIT IPC Services Offshoring Working Group; the Group’s final report was released in September 2006.  Prior to this, Tim held several research positions at MIT. Tim studies the process of global integration and is interested in its implications for economic performance, corporate strategy, and public policy. He is co-editor (with Momoko Kawakami) of Local Learning in Global Value Chains: Experiences from East Asia , forthcoming from Palgrave Macmillan, and has published his research in international peer-reviewed journals including Studies in Comparative International Development, Industrial and Corporate Change, Review of International Political Economy, Journal of East Asian Studies, and Journal of Economic Geography.

Title

Compressed Development

Co-authors

D.Hugh Whittaker, Tainbiao Zhu, Mon Han Tsai, and Toshi Okita

Abstract

In this paper we argue that the path of economic development for would-be developers has changed fundamentally since the 1980s.  Focusing on East Asia, we contend that the path depicted in the “late development” model has become all but impassible.  The path is now better depicted as one of “compressed development.”  Key differences are the scale and consequences of compression, the primary mode of engagement with the world economy – via global value chains – and their interaction.  Compressed development forces states to address a number of simultaneous challenges, resulting in “policy stretch.”  We identify features of the “adaptive state” which address these challenges using a broad perspective that spans economic and social dimensions of development.