Beyond the neoliberal-statist divide on the drivers of innovation: A political settlements reading of Kenya's M-Pesa success story
Beyond the neoliberal-statist divide on the drivers of innovation: A political settlements reading of Kenya's M-Pesa success story
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超越新自由主义与国家主义在创新驱动因素上的分歧：对肯尼亚 M-Pesa 成功故事的政治解决解读
DOI：
10.1016/j.worlddev.2019.104621
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发表时间：
2020
影响因子：
6.9
通讯作者：
Tyce M
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Tyce M
虽然现在人们普遍认为创新是生产率增长的关键驱动力，但关于国家在促进创新方面的作用的辩论仍然在两种相互竞争的分析和意识形态范式之间两极分化。第一种是新自由主义，它将国家局限于纠正市场失灵、确保竞争和支持私营部门的创新力量。第二种模式借鉴发展型国家的现象，呼吁建立一个强大而有远见的国家，通过瞄准投资行业和保护公司直到它们准备好面对竞争来推动创新。文献大致福尔斯这些阵营，将创新确定为市场或国家驱动的过程。本文对两者都提出了挑战，认为创新有多种途径，其中许多代表了一个更混乱的中间地带。肯尼亚自2007年推出其开创性的M-Pesa服务以来，已成为移动的货币创新的温床。新自由主义和中央集权主义的解释无法解释这个故事，这个故事需要与跨越这一鸿沟的潜在权力关系联系起来。M-Pesa的成功是在一个高度特殊化和以赞助为基础的政治背景下实现的，肯尼亚政治解决方案中的关键群体的利益已经明确，以保护M-Pesa的母公司Safaricom，其所有权结构和战略伙伴关系吸引了来自各个政治派别的精英，免受竞争。这为Safaricom提供了通过M-Pesa进行创新的空间，产生了一种形式的“发展型世袭主义”，在这种形式下，它已成为一种工具，根据长期愿景将租金集中并部署在战略行业中，通过慷慨的股息支付将利润分配给精英。最后，本文呼吁对创新的驱动因素，特别是移动的货币的采用，有更细致的政治经济学理解。
While there is now broad consensus that innovation is a key driver of productivity growth, debates about the state’s role in promoting innovation remain polarised between two competing analytical and ideological paradigms. The first is neoliberalism, which confines the state to correcting market failures, ensuring competition and supporting the innovative force of the private-sector. Drawing on the developmental state phenomenon, the second calls for a strong and visionary state to drive innovation by targeting industries for investment and protecting firms until they are ready to face competition. The literature broadly falls within these camps, identifying innovation as a market- or state-driven process. This paper challenges both, arguing that there are multiple pathways to innovation, many of which represent a messier middle ground. The case of Kenya, which has become a hotbed for mobile money innovation since launching its pioneering M-Pesa service in 2007, is used to make this argument. Neoliberal and statist accounts fail to explain this story, which needs to be framed in relation to underlying power relations that span this divide. The M-Pesa success has played out within a highly-particularistic and patronage-based political context, whereby the interests of key groups within Kenya’s political settlement have crystallised to shield M-Pesa's parent company Safaricom, whose ownership structure and strategic partnerships draw in elites from across the political spectrum, from competition. This has afforded Safaricom space to innovate with M-Pesa, engendering a form of ‘developmental patrimonialism’ within which it has become a vehicle for rents to be centralised and deployed within strategic industries according to a long-term vision, with profits parcelled back to elites through generous dividend pay-outs. Concluding, the paper calls for more nuanced political economy understandings of the drivers of innovation, and mobile money adoption in particular.