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The article deploys servicisation as a case study to discuss economists' methods and the confirmation bias issue. Data show the average pattern of structural transformation in developing countries has since the early 1990s been servicisation, and the faster the growth, the greater the servicisation. Data also show that servicisation has been an extremely under-researched topic compared with industrialisation. This is an example of confirmation bias—weak links between theory and facts—that erodes the plausibility of policy advice. The paper analyses methods and their policing, and points to issues to address to reduce risks of confirmation bias by strengthening 'the power of facts'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines prospects for policy to enhance contemporary economic development. Shortcomings of mainstream economic analyses are evident since the Cold War, with failure to establish policy doctrines engaging with developing countries' structural transformation: on average, not industrialisation, but servicization: capital and labour moving from agriculture to services. Faster-growing countries show greater servicization, yet overtly services-focused strategies are rare, and policy doctrine and economic analysis focuses on industrialisation. Literature searches show that servicization is largely ignored, reducing possibilities for policy-supported growth. Demonstrating this, the article argues that "internal" aspects of mainstream data and theory create severe confirmation bias, explaining this failure. If the "state" is there to support capitalism, in this area it seems to be doing rather badly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The commentary addresses, with constructive suggestions, the tension between common beliefs that development knowledge is not predictive and the general requirement that it be used to support instrumental action (using devices such as the log frame or theories of change that embody ideas that X will lead to Y). I suggest that this tension is best resolved differently from much current practice, which tends to fudge the issue. I draw two central implications: first, that stakeholders to a possible development intervention decide formally, before proceeding, whether the context and knowledge of it suggest that it is wise to proceed instrumentally or not; second, that a positive aspect of the 'fudge' is that a significant share of development interventions, whilst organized according to instrumental principles (such as the log frame or theories of change), in fact lack suitable knowledge and so are, in reality, non-instrumental. In such contexts, development professionals, in fact, have well-developed but informal methods for acting 'non-instrumentally'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores ways to better understand corruption in Vietnam and the nature of Vietnamese capitalism. Given the current state of research, its arguments are not conclusive and focus upon empirics and issues in existing research. Regarding empirics, good data imply that corrupt payments by firms to Party officials are now so large – perhaps a quarter of gross domestic product – that their macro-systemic impacts must be, whilst still unclear, substantial. At such levels they likely have been allowing their recipients rapidly to build large asset-holdings. But the Party's generalised protection of demands for corrupt payments remains muted. Importantly, 2007 Party Directive #15 has been protecting Party members from corruption investigations, so that in effect they are not illegal. The research available, however, commonly treats Vietnamese corruption mainly as an indicator of state dysfunctionality, which fails to embrace the possibility that it is central to contemporary accumulation processes. The speculative argument is that at some point "pirates become businessmen" and the Vietnamese state will then shift, historically, from protecting corruption to protecting capital. In this framing, the decentralised nature of asset accumulation conditions political change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]