This book explains how and why major developing countries like Brazil, China, and India globalized state-led development by creating homegrown multinational corporations. It explores how this strategy allows national firms to access new sources of profits, knowledge, and technology by producing and innovating across the globe. Drawing on an in-depth study of Brazil, alongside comparative analyses of China and India, the book demonstrates how development banks enable governments to influence business strategies and navigate political contestation. Moving beyond accounts that portray globalization and democracy as constraints on industrial policy, the book shows that late developers have changed the strategies for, but not renounced the ambition of, the structural transformation of their economies. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

‘Sierra gives us an antidote to outmoded views of how neo-liberal globalization is evolving in the Global South. From Brazil to China, major developing countries confront private capital based in the North with complex combinations of state-led strategies built around their own globalizing firms. Sierra’s sophisticated analysis, firmly anchored in detailed multi-country research, is a gift, not just to scholars of comparative political economy, but also to actors of the Global South interested in reflecting on how to better formulate policies and political strategy.’ 

Peter Evans - University of California, Berkeley

‘This important book shows that states both need, and have innovated, new strategies to achieve economic structural transformation in a globalized world. Sierra convincingly claims that supporting national firms to expand abroad can both advance those firms and set the stage for growth at home, even within democratic constraints. Deeply researched, illuminating and beautifully written, this book deserves a wide readership among anyone interested in how states continue to be central to economic development.’

Kathryn Hochstetler - London School of Economics and Political Science

‘This essential book makes a crucial contribution to the new institutionalism in political science and its longstanding concern with how ideas shape policy. Drawing on an exceptionally rich array of data and methods, Sierra delivers an empirical tour de force that compellingly demonstrates how economic ideas are modified in response to shifting global challenges, and their impact on institutional evolution, driving far-reaching policy change. Its counterintuitive analysis will shift debates on industrial policy.’

Maria Victoria Murillo - Columbia University

‘This pathbreaking book rethinks globalizing developmental states. Sierra deftly explains how state actors reconceived development strategy and repurposed development banks to push domestic firms to invest abroad. Sierra’s deeply researched, convincingly argued and eminently readable book sets a new standard for analyzing developmental states in the twenty-first century.’

Ben Ross Schneider - Massachusetts Institute of Technology