MITI and the Japanese Miracle

Chalmers Johnson wrote the book that introduced the term developmental state, tracing the history of Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry and its predecessors from 1925 to 1975. His argument is that Japan's postwar growth was the product of deliberate state direction of industrial development, and that this constitutes a distinct form of political economy rather than a variant of either the American or the Soviet model.

Johnson's central distinction is between the regulatory state, which sets rules for competition and does not concern itself with outcomes, and the developmental state, which sets substantive goals for which industries should exist and directs resources toward them. He argues that Japan's institutions for doing this were built during the wartime mobilisation and survived the American occupation largely intact, with the same ministries and often the same officials. He describes the instruments: control of foreign exchange allocation, licensing of technology imports, directed credit through the Japan Development Bank, tax measures, cartel authorisation for recession and rationalisation, and administrative guidance, which is informal direction backed by the ministry's discretionary powers.

The thesis provoked decades of argument. Critics including Michael Porter and, from within Japanese studies, several economists have shown that MITI opposed some of Japan's most successful ventures, including Sony's transistor licence and Honda's entry into cars, and that the industries the ministry targeted most heavily were not always the ones that succeeded. Japan's subsequent stagnation weakened the model's prestige further. Johnson's institutional history remains the standard account, and his framework has been applied extensively to Korea, Taiwan and China, where it fits at least as well.