Introduction • 25 and welfare reform were studied, both countries have prioritized ‘crossing the river by feeling the stones’. Not surprisingly then, proponents of the ‘good governance’ agenda consider the public sector reform programmes of China and Vietnam plagued by ‘poor sequencing’. Painter concludes that if the development and reform experiences of China and Vietnam can be generalized, governance reforms may best be considered second-order measures to ‘mop up’ the adverse consequences of badly governed development. He suggests that governance will only improve after people appreciate, from bitter experience, the adverse consequences of badly governed markets, and then demand better quality public goods and services, as happened in the historical experience of the West. Painter sums up his conclusion by suggesting that ‘good governance can come later’. In Chapter 8, Mushtaq Khan argues that the emphasis in policy and analysis on ‘good governance’ capabilities is symptomatic of a deeper bias in contemporary economic policy and research. Supporters of the good governance reform agenda have failed to identify convincing case studies of countries that have actually made significant economic transformations from poverty to high standards of living by following the agenda they propose. Even if improvements in governance capabilities in developing countries could improve growth, it does not follow that such improvements will be sufficient to achieve a developmental transformation. Although case studies and statistical evidence underscore the importance of governance, they suggest that a different set of governance capabilities are required. Countries that have achieved significant developmental transitions in the past half century now have strong governance capabilities, but none of them would have scored highly in terms of ‘good governance’ measures when their take-offs began or for a considerable period thereafter. Rather, they prioritized developing governance capabilities to address specific problems, such as overcoming constraints limiting technology acquisition, solving problems in allocating valuable resources such as land, and maintaining political stability within acceptable limits. Khan describes such government capabilities as developmental or growth-enhancing governance capabilities. For Khan, the experiences of the East Asian developmental states, with their significant developmental capabilities, no longer provide many useful lessons or much guidance for setting immediate governance reform priorities. Their post-war ‘political settlements’ were unusual, allowing them to more effectively intervene to overcome development constraints on a scale not feasible in most developing countries anymore. Most developing countries will probably not be able to make enough progress on these capabilities to have a significant impact on their development prospects.
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