“Community, State, and Market in Economic Development: Changing roles in Modernizing Asian Villages”(Nippon Hyoron sya, 2020)

Kei Kajisa(Professor, School of International Politics, Economics and Communication, Aoyama Gakuin University)

It is a distinct honor and privilege to receive the Masayoshi Ohira Memorial Prize. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the board member of the foundation and the selection committee. My book discussed how we should combine community, market, and state for sustainable development, based on the cases from Asian villages including Japanese ones. I put a particular focus on the community because the research on its role is scanty, relative to the research on the roles of the state and the market on which the theories on public goods and market failure are already available in Economics. I believe that it is getting more and more important to have a better understanding on the potentials and limitations of the communities in less developed countries because their communities are changing dramatically under the rapid economic development. Moreover, the importance of this kind of research is increasing under the COVID 19 pandemic because we need to think about a socially optimal self-restraint behavior. A tight and exclusive community is effective to protect its member form the invasion of pathogen, but such a community also limits the opportunities to get its members connected with new ideas and resources. My book discussed the tight communities in the chapters about irrigation managements and explored the importance of new connections in the chapters about rural labor markets. The state and the market can also play their roles for this aim, the former by using its coercive power and the latter through economic incentives such as subsidies and fines. An ultimate issue is how we should coordinate the roles of three organizations, given huge local variations in community mechanisms, governance capacities, and market mechanisms. I wish my book provides a lot of hints to consider this issue. I would like to thank to my advisors, co-researchers, book editors, and above all, people in the villages who answered to my research interviews regardless of their busy schedule. I hope my research will eventually contribute to the improvement in the livelihood of the people in the fields.

Profile
Kei Kajisa earned a Ph. D. in Agricultural Economics at Michigan State University in 1999. Before joining in the current position in 2012, he was a consultant at the World Bank, a faculty fellow at the Foundation for Advanced Studies on International Development (FASID), an associate professor at National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies (GRIPS), and a senior scientist at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI). He has been conducting a large number of household and community surveys in Asia and Africa on agricultural development and the transformation of rural communities. His latest publications include a journal article titled “The effect of volumetric pricing policy on farmers’ water management institutions and their water use: the case of water user organization in an irrigation system in Hubei, China” (co-authored, World Bank Economic Review, 2017) and a book titled “Changes in rice farming in the Philippines: Insights from five decades of household-level survey” (co-authored, IRRI, 2015).