Organizer and Chair: Anthony P. D'Costa, University of Washington, Tacoma
The last two decades have witnessed profound restructuring of the world economy with East and South-East Asian growth contributing to fundamental realignment of the international political economy. After decades of inward-looking policies, India began economic liberalization in the early 1980s, moving much more rapidly since 1991. It hopes to take advantage of global opportunities and participate, albeit belatedly, in Asian growth. By looking east toward the dynamic Asian region, India also hopes to promote economic development and make its political presence more credible. The objective of this panel is to situate India in the larger Asian context by identifying the different ways by which the Indian economy and society are being integrated with the Asian region and to draw out some of the implications of incorporation on India's economic and social development. This panel aims to articulate salient changes in Asia and how they affect India's economic, technological, and institutional relationship with Asia. The central question is how the interaction between economic reforms in India and high growth in East and South-East Asia will influence Indian development. Relatedly, whether there will be social and institutional spin-offs from increased integration with Asia will be also addressed, especially because Asian capitalism is organized differently from the West. Various integrative, institutional frameworks in an interdisciplinary manner are used to assess the form and pace of India's integration. These include macro political-economic, industry-specific, as well as social-cultural.
Situating India in Asia: Multiple Approaches to an Integrative Framework
Anthony P. D'Costa, University of Washington, Tacoma
This paper develops an integrative framework to understand India's integration with Asia. It is part of a larger collaborative project involving several scholars from Asia and the U.S. Understandably the recent literature on integration has little to say about India. When South Asia is included in economic analysis the focus is largely macroeconomic, rooted in comparative advantage arguments and devoid of institutional dynamics. Hence most research is unable to make critical connections between economic and socio-institutional changes in India and in the region. Rarely is the nature of integration investigated at the individual industry levels. Even if it is received wisdom that economic liberalization and market reforms are the basis for India's integration with Asia, none have to my knowledge specified the actual form and content of India's integration in a systematic manner. This paper aims to develop a framework that is at once integrative and interdisciplinary. It relates economic, technological, institutional, and social dimensions of integration.
Four overlapping approaches will be discussed: Macroeconomic -for the direction, magnitude, and composition of trade and investment; Institutional-firm level for technology flows by source and industry and "Asian"-type organizational practices accompanying technology transfer; Bilateral arrangement-each country's specific relationship with India, and Industry-Specific -detailing collaboration, restructuring, and position in Asia. These will account for the forces pulling India into the region and pushing India outward from within.
The Indian Steel Industry in the Context of India's Integration with Asia
Ram Prasad Sengupta, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi
This paper situates the Indian steel industry in the context of rapidly changing East Asia and India's liberalization of trade and industry. As the third largest producer of steel among the developing countries of Asia, this paper will project the likely volume and direction of India's trade flows in steel, taking account of: (a) some of the important inter-industrial linkages of steel in the economies of the dominant players of the region and (b) the emerging new pattern of international division of labor among the concerned economies.
On the supply side of the industry, the paper will assess the relative competitive power of India vis-à-vis other Asian countries in terms of cost and quality of steel. It will point to the likely role of Asian foreign capital in the future development of the Indian steel industry and its potential ability to influence the technical and institutional changes as well as the human resource development in the industry.
The Indian steel industry has traditionally looked toward Europe for technology and human resource development. India will remain an importer of technology and complementary service inputs (like training, consultancy, etc.) for its absorption in the steel industry. But with Asian industrial development and decline in the west, India's links with South Korea and Japan are also likely to increase. These would be in select technological and organizational areas. To what extent the Indian state will tilt more toward the East rather than the West will be addressed as well.
Can Indo-Japanese Cooperation Provide Opportunities for Culturally Appropriate
Organizational Changes in the Indian Workplace?
Samuel K. Parker, University of Washington, Tacoma
The increasing involvement of Japanese firms in India raises questions about the potential efficacy in the Indian context of those distinctive cultural forms of Japanese organization that have been recognized by many to be significant factors in the success of Japanese capitalism. As Kondo (1990) suggests, the distinctive features of Japanese capitalism may be at least partly attributed to its adoption and adaptation of the organizational template provided by the ie ("traditional" household enterprise). Parallels can be found in India for the importance of the family and social networks for meaningful realizations of self (Shweder 1991). Indigenous Indian values concerning self, society and material production were not generally deployed as positive resources by the British in establishing political and economic institutions in South Asia. Indeed, if anything they were presumed to be obstacles to rational development. This colonial cultural alienation, never directly imposed on Japan, may in part, account for the limited success of Western political-economic institutions in India. The recent establishment of Indo-Japanese business cooperation provides an opportunity to ask if there might already be indigenous Indian modes of self-construction and meaningful socio-institutional practices operating informally in traditional village, family or neighborhood contexts that may provide useful models analogous to, or potentially compatible with Japanese forms of business organization. I propose an exploratory paper that will examine this question based partly on the literature and partly on my own ethnographic fieldwork on the distinctively local modes of organization and production utilized in the construction of Hindu temples in South India.