Under the extremes of Indian socialism, the financial system was a handmaiden for state control of the economy, directing resources according to the wishes of the government. State control was achieved through government ownership. A great deal has changed, with a first (1947–1992) and second (1992–2016) phase of central planning where there were conflicting themes of liberalization and enhanced state control. In many areas, private financial firms are now important. The full ecosystem of modern finance, with information processing and risk taking by private persons, blossomed in the equity market. For two decades there was a remarkable policy process that yielded gains in fields such as the equity market, pension reforms, bankruptcy code and so on. But alongside this there was the expansion of the ‘administrative state’ in the form of financial regulators. Regulators engage in micro-management of products and processes. While there is isomorphic mimicry with many things that look like a financial system, officials retain substantial control over how finance works. In a functional perspective, Indian finance today resembles the environment of the 1980s more than meets the eye.

This chapter provides an overview of the process of urbanization after 1947 and its impacts, highlighting its contested meanings, measurement and policy outcomes. Noting the contrasting ways in which urbanization is occurring, the chapter first reviews the debates over India’s slow urbanization and its possible causes. It then turns to the way the government has influenced the process through the dirigisme policies of the first forty years since independence, followed by economic liberalization in the last three decades. Some of these policies are best observed in the changing profile of the largest cities of the country, such as the three colonial port cities of Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai and, to a lesser extent, in small towns and emerging urban places. Improvements in urban services and quality of life have occurred, but unevenly, with small towns and poorer households in larger cities lagging behind.

This chapter provides an analytic account of the evolution of India’s industrial sector in the context of the overall performance of the economy in the post-independence era. Since trade policy has had a determining impact on overall growth as well as on the structure of the industry, special attention is paid to it. The chapter first reviews the performance of the industry as a whole during the seventy years from 1951/1952 to 2019/2020, dividing it into four distinct phases. It argues that the pursuit of self-sufficiency, specialization in heavy industry and a heavy hand of socialism were at the heart of growth below 4% during the first four decades after independence. Subsequently, liberalizing reforms did accelerate growth, but the slow pace of the removal of multilayered regulation of the early decades remained in the way of East Asian-style rapid transformation of the economy from a rural and agricultural structure to an urban and industrial one.

Tracing the trajectory of journalism fields in Africa from the 1700s to the early to mid-2000s, this chapter highlights the tensions between the political and journalism fields in postcolonial Africa. It focuses on the numerous ways political fields sought to assert control over journalism through colonial-era laws and using their financial muscle to cajole the fields. It shows that ideas about the role of journalism fields were contested both within and outside the field, with some in the field agreeing with the political field with regard to a limited approach to journalistic freedoms. It shows how political elites were keen on controlling journalism fields upon independence primarily because they were aware of the fields’ enormous potential to challenge their legitimacy after using them to push for independence.

South Korea implemented vertical as well as horizontal industrial policies in the 1960s and 1970s. Though they performed better than in other developing countries, the cost of the vertical policy outweighed its benefit. Industrial policies went side by side with the emergence of chaebol in a full-fledged form. Chaebol led the structural transformation of the economy, but they also led the production of non-performing loans, helping to deepen the 1979 crisis. In the 1980s, the government lifted vertical policy but strengthened horizontal policy while restructuring chaebol. In the 1990s, South Korea jumped into the newly-emerging information and communication technology industries with industrial policy. Meanwhile, the government began to promote small and medium-sized enterprises and introduced fair trade policies in the 1980s. By the mid-1990s, chaebol emerged as global players in higher-technology industries; however, they had many problems, the financial market problem being the most serious, ready to precipitate a crisis.

In the second half of the 1960s, Austria seized on the Italian gas-for-pipe initiative and closed a deal with the Soviet Union. This presented a peculiar problem for the country’s small economy. Under the hegemony of convertibility of the US dollar, as well as the competitive, liberalizing impetus initiated in the establishment of the EEC, Austria feared that the coming large outlays in purchases of Soviet gas would not in turn be spent in Austria. The Soviets were pressuring Austria to liberalize its markets and do away with the strict balancing of trade that had been the norm during Bretton Woods through the technology of negotiated, long-term trade lists. They were right to fear. The Soviets were eager to spend the convertible currency earned through gas exports as profitably as possible. Years before military exports and Petrodollar recycling resolved a similar problem for the United States and Western Europe, Austria struggled to maintain the kind of accounts-balancing, barter exchange with the socialist world it had enjoyed in the postwar period. Market integration seemed inexorable. And the face of that inexorability was the Soviet Union.

This chapter explains the logic behind the choice of institutions that the book highlights. A liberal order is impossible without the capacity to form organizations able to act on behalf of private constituencies. Apart from providing shared goods, private organizations restrain entities capable of repression, including the state. Hence, a section of the book is devoted to exploring the political effects of Islamic and modern waqfs. Whereas the former played key roles in keeping civil society anemic, the latter is now invigorating civic life. Religious repression has been ubiquitous in the Middle East. In inducing preference and knowledge falsification in broad domains, it conceals doubts about policies promoted in the name of religion. In the process, it impoverishes and distorts public discourse. For these reasons alone, religious freedoms are also essential to liberal governance. Economic freedoms are pivotal because they shape political incentives and capacities. Private property rights, the freedom to invest, and predictable taxation are among the determinants of private political capacities. So are characteristics of the available forms of economic organization. Institutions that limit the scale, longevity, and complexity of Middle Eastern enterprises have reduced the political reach of private economic actors.

Islam’s historical institutional complex has delayed a liberal order in the Middle East, not blocked it permanently. The institutions primarily responsible for the region’s historical trajectory are either gone or, under new conditions, they no longer inhibit liberalization. The infrastructure for an effective civil society is in place. Apart from private associations, it includes perpetual enterprises. And no absolute barrier exists to reinterpreting illiberal readings of Islam. By and large, the institutions that sustain the region’s repressive regimes are mutually supporting. For example, religious illiberalism facilitates associational repression, and vice versa. In any one context, the interlinkages among various institutions may work against liberalization, because change depends on appropriate movements in complementary institutions. The half-full part of this glass is that altering a single institution can destabilize others, possibly unleashing a cascade of mutually reinforcing reforms. Yet there is probably no quick fix to the prevailing illiberalism. Many patterns must change for the Middle East to reach advanced standards of liberty. Although specific changes can stimulate one another, each involves adjustments to interpersonal norms, organizational rules, and state laws. Some would upset longstanding status rankings and hierarchies. Learning civic skills requires communal practice. Vested interests are already organized.

This chapter explores Tunisia's history as an authoritarian country that struggled with economic developing, ultimately resulting in a parasitic crony capitalist class closely allied with the regime. While the Arab Uprisings ushered in democracy, they failed to replace these crony networks as business engaged with parties in the new democracy. Unlike Egypt, Tunisia remained a democracy, but the presence of crony capitalists as party funders undermined reform efforts and the ultimate success of the democratic project.

This chapter concludes with thoughts about how democratic activists might be able to remove crony capitalism from institutions. The chapter argues that transparency about the depth of corruption is a necessary first step, especially in terms of understanding who controls rents in the regime. Only when these networks of influence are mapped can democratic accountability start to lead to lasting change.

This chapter puts forward a theory to explain how businesses engage in politics following democratic transitions in countries with significant issues with corruption. The most important variable is the centralization of the networks of brokers who supply companies with needed government privileges. If these rent networks are narrow, then businesspeople must work through a single gatekeeper. If they are broad, then business can engage with multiple brokers and obtain rent more easily.

The Strategic Value Framework developed in this book explicates the dominant sectoral patterns of market governance in Russia today. Historical process tracing from sectoral origins of labor-intensive textiles and capital-intensive telecommunication in this chapter shows how Russian state leaders intersubjectively respond to objective economic and political pressures. The political basis and evolution of the perceived strategic value of national security and resource management took root in the Soviet era through Soviet collapse and transition to and away from democratic rule. In the context of macro-liberalization and mass privatization at the founding of the Russian Federation, interacting perceived strategic value and sectoral structures and organization of institutions have shaped the centralized role of the state in market coordination and variegated property rights arrangements of centralized governance in defense-origin dual use telecommunications reenforced by the rise of Vladimir Putin aided by economic and political crises. The less strategic value of non-defense sectors, such as textiles, is governed by the decentralized coordination and dominant private property of private governance and decentralized governance since Gorbachev’s perestroika. The rise of bifurcated oligarchy in Russian-style capitalism are shaped by the joined imperatives of resource security nationalism and path-dependent sectoral organization of institutions.

In parallel to the centralized governance of strategic industries in Chapter 4, the lower degree and narrower scope of the perceived strategic value of labor intensive and less value-added sectors, represented by textiles, for national security and the national technology base, has shaped decentralized governance and private governance in nonstrategic sectors. In the context of sectoral structural and organization of institutions, less concerned about controlling products or services that have few applications for national security and low contribution to the national technology base, the central state introduced competition in textiles in the 1980s and devolved market coordination of quasi-state and private ownership to local governments and commerce bureaus by the early 1990s before China’s World Trade Organization accession. The cross-time sector and company case studies reveal the interacting strategic value and sectoral logics apply at the subsector. Capital-intensive and more value-added technical textiles experience more deliberate market coordination by local governments and the central state and are characterized by mixed property rights sponsored by and connected with state-run research and development institutions. Taken together the textile industry today experiences periodic overexpansion, environmental degradation, and reactive local state interventions in response to economic reverberations and central-level environmental and developmental mandates.

This chapter shows how in parallel to the regulated governance in telecommunications uncovered in Chapter 7, the perceived strategic value of labor-intensive industries dominated by rural small-scale producers, showcased by textiles, for national self-reliance and neoliberal development, shape the centralized governance by the Indian government. The cross-time sector and company case studies reveal that at a time when centralized market coordination in labor-intensive, less value-added textiles is eliminated around the world, India created a central ministry and other sector-specific bureaucracies in textiles associated with nationalist narratives of Gandhian Swadeshi self-reliance in the 1980s following internal political and economic crises. Endowed with limited resources and regulatory capacity, the centralized governance of the textile ministry has introduced extensive competition in the neoliberal era and deliberately intervened in market developments. In addition to subsidizing industrial upgrading and deregulating market entry, business scope, and trade, the textile ministry has nationalized large-scale textile mills of the organized sector during economic slowdowns. Moreover, fiscal and protectionist trade policies have also cushioned the survival of small-scale, labor-intensive handlooms in apparel and clothing and the highly polluting power looms dominant in more capital-intensive technical textiles even as the state promotes export-oriented industrialization.

This chapter shows how the perceived strategic value of high-tech, globally integrated sectors, represented by telecommunications, for neoliberal development interacts with sectoral structures and organization of institutions. The resultant regulated governance by the Indian government of telecommunications are the micro-institutional foundations of Indian-style capitalism undergirding the globalization and development of such industries disconnected from the post-Independence legacies of the Indian nationalist imagination. The cross-time sector and company case studies show the initial introduction of competition in telecommunications occurred during Big Bang Liberalization supported by pro-liberalization industrial stakeholders disconnected from the existing telecommunications bureaucracy. Today a central-level ministry makes policy and an independent regulator enforces the market entry and business scope of a state-owned fixed-line operator and fiercely competitive mobile carriers and value-added service providers. The role of the state in market coordination and the dominant property rights arrangements vary by subsector as a function of interacting strategic value and sectoral logics. Nehruvian interpretation of Gandhian Swadeshi self-reliance has retained bureaucratic oversight of the development of state- and privately-owned equipment makers, which concentrated on rural automatic exchanges and low-tech inputs until the dominance of Chinese competition pivoted focus to indigenous development in new generation mobile consumer and terminal telecommunications equipment.