Search

The article explores connections between technology and the formation of postcolonial national identity in Indonesia during a period of industrialization between the years 1950 and 1975. Particular attention is paid to the building of a steel plant in Cilegon, West Java as an example of the various narratives of national identity that were employed to justify its construction and exemplified visions of industrialization. It is argued that technology and national identity were used as mutually reinforcing roles to define Indonesia's geographic and political place in the world. The politics surrounding the opening of the Trikora steel plant is examined. The difficulties of constructing the Krakatau Steel plant are presented.

This paper explores Rosenstein-Rodan's idea that simultaneous industrialization of many sectors of the economy can be profitable for them all even when no sector can break even industrializing alone. We analyze this idea in the context of an imperfectly competitive economy with aggregate demand spillovers and interpret the big push into industrialization as a move from a bad to a good equilibrium. We present three mechanisms for generating a big push and discuss their relevance for less developed countries. The analysis of this paper has established some, though by no means all, conditions under which a backward economy can make a big push into industrialization by coordinating investments across sectors. The principal idea is that the big push is possible in economics in which industrialized firms capture in their profits only a fraction of the total contribution of their investment to the profits of other industrializing firms. In our examples, a firm adopting increasing returns must be shifting demand toward manufactured goods, redistributing demand toward the periods in which other firms sell, or paying part of the cost of the essential infrastructure, such as a railroad. In these cases, the firm can help foster a mutually profitable big posh even when it. would lose money industrializing alone. All our models have the common feature that complementarities between industrializing sectors work through market size effects. In the first two models, industrialization of one sector raises the demand for other manufactures directly and so makes large-scale production in other sectors more attractive. In the railroad model, industrialization in one sector increases the size of the market for railroad services used by other sectors and so renders the provision of these services more viable The analysis may also have some implications for the role of government in the development process. First, a program that encourages industrialization in many sectors ... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the prevailing thesis that universalism progressively increases with industrialization and the outline of an emerging pattern of change in South Africa which began industrialization after the industrialization of the West. Universalistic pressure brought upon by industrialization upon particularistic racial and ethnic relations; Characteristics of modernization from the center.