Leapfrogging on Steroids

Accounts of economic development as catch-up, via technological leverage and leapfrogging, have been successfully applied to explain cases of catch-up by East Asian countries, from Japan through Korea to Taiwan, Singapore, and others. Now in the twenty-first century it is the turn of emerging industrializing giants, led by China, but with India, Brazil, and others also looking to catch up, drawing as much as possible from the prior experiences and strategies of East Asia. But these emerging giants are looking to industrialize in fundamentally different circumstances from those that applied in earlier cases as industrialization powered by fossil fuels and linear resource flows is no longer feasible, not just because countries have pledged to reduce carbon emissions, but because at the scale required for the industrialization of China, India and others, fossil fuels present insuperable energy and resource security problems. They confront geopolitical limits to growth that demand alternative green strategies if they are to be evaded. The argument is developed in this chapter that green development strategies are the only feasible strategies for such countries to enable them to bring their industrialization processes to fruition. This chapter outlines the issues and options open to them, and evaluates the strategies pursued so far, demonstrating how they necessitate a break with the path dependence inherited from earlier patterns of industrialization. Green growth strategies turn out to be a strategic necessity; they promise to become the developmental norm in the twenty-first century, enabling the more recent industrial arrivals to leapfrog their predecessors.