The Japanese Civil Service and Economic Development: Catalysts of Change.

• Author: Bronfenbrenner, Martin

There are two "ideal types" of civil-service bureaucracy. At one extreme is the routine-ridden, wheel spinning faineant of Dickens' "Circumlocution Office." At the other extreme is the tyrannical autocratic oligarchy of Solzhenitsyn's We Never Make Mistakes. (Some systems aspire to dialectical unification of the two!) Actual civil-service agencies, of course, are somewhere in between, with bits of benevolence and efficiency usually added. Among the most successful, as regards growing economies, has been the relatively small and highly meritocratic Japanese civil service in the half-century since 1945. The hefty and perhaps over-stuffed volume under review is a multi-national collection of 18 essays by as many authors, under the auspices of the World Bank Economic Development Institute's Program for the Study of Japan's Development Management Experience. The book may be more directly relevant to Public Policy and Public Administration than to Development Economics as economists know it. Yet its economic content justifies attention by economists, particularly those of Japanological or comparativist bent.

Your reviewer began his "read" with a fairly conventional view of Japanese postwar development as master-minded by 4 (or perhaps 3 1/2) Bigs: Big Business, Big Bureaucracy, Big Politics (a 1 1/2-party system under the Liberal Democrats), and Big Agriculture (the "1/2" of our summary). But among the Bigs, including the co-operations and competitions between them, which are the dogs wagging which others as mils? Japan watchers disagree. Chalmers Johnson's M1TI and the Japanese Miracle (1982) comes close to making one important branch of the Civil Service the linch-pin of the entire Japanese "development state." Several other writers, chiefly American but including Yutaka Kosai, Yoshiro Miwa, and Ryutaro Komiya in Japan, ascribe primacy to the impersonal market and "market forces," distinctly down-playing the Civil Service. The majority view - but falling short of unanimity - in this book comes closer to Johnson than to his opponents.

This World Bank collection is divided into five parts. Of these, the fifth, comprising four essays on "Comparative Perspectives," may be of most immediate interest to the general economist. Comparison is made with Korea (Professor Woo-Cumings), the former Soviet Union (Professor Thornton), Western Europe as a whole (Professor Ball), and the world with special reference to the LDCs (Dr. Kim). I was impressed...