74 SOCIAL SCIENTIST In other respects, however, Johnson is quite candid. A major chapter of the book is concerned with elaborating the political and administrative pre-requisites for any nation wishing to follow the Japanese example (he lists So*uth Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore as countries following similar strategies). This chapter is particularly important for Johnson clearly expects to be read seriously. The specific provisions which he describes are, in Tact, in a form where they can be parcelled into the ^advice" acco'mpanying credit given to countries of the Third World by institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. They bear similarities of assumption with policy prescriptions already familiar. The final merit of Chalmers Johnson's book lies generally in the information he provides on the specific tools of Japanese industrial policy. However, to Indians (his book is clearly directed towards his North American opponents), familiar with the existence of tlie Industrial Development and Regulation Act, the Capital Issues Control Act, the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act, and potential controls on imports and exports, there is little conceptually novel in the Japanese system of guiding industrialisation.2 India's limping industrial growth rate has continued in spite of all the tools the administration might want, with as heavy a burden imposed on the Indian people .and with a huge amount of technological imports. The only answer to the I inevitable question about the differential performance of the Japanese and Indian economies available from Johnson is the brief mention that in Japan there was the sustained realisation (and this realisation was politically sustainable) that it is the development of the internal market which is crucial to economic growth This is largely due to Johnson's conception of political economy. He thinks that it comprises essentially the study of the relationships between governmental institutions and economic activity. Had he worked with Lenin's classic definition that "it is not with 'production' that political economy deak, but with the social relation of men in production, with the social system of production^', he would have been better able to provide a true case study of industrialisation.3 II Two points need to be made clear about Japan's economic performance. The first is the remarkable rise in industrial production 2 Aftej a geneially appreciative review of Johnson's book by one of Fortune's editors, a member of Reagan's Council of Economic Affairs, responded a full year later. He attempted to refute Johnson's propositions and claimed that Japanese economic growth was due to the operation of the capitalist market mechanism rather than to MITI's policy. Sec Robert Lubar, "Inside MITI", Fortune 106 (1982), 5, and David R Hcnderson, "A Differenes of Opinion: The Myth of MITl", Fortune 108(1983), 3. 3 V I Lenin, "The Revelopment of Capitalism in Russia", in Collected Works, Moscow, Progress .1960, Vol 3, pp 62-63.