Globalization did not end state-led development; it changed how governments pursue it. In a new book, Kellogg Faculty Fellow Jazmín Sierra shows how some developing countries have adapted industrial policy by supporting national firms beyond their borders.
Published in Cambridge University Press’s Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics series, Globalized State-led Development: How States Support Firms at Home and Abroad (2026) draws on an in-depth study of Brazil alongside a comparative analysis of China. Sierra examines how governments support firms’ international expansion to gain access to foreign markets, knowledge, and technology—and, in turn, promote more productive and skill-intensive economic activity at home.
Sierra calls this model “globalized state-led development”: a system in which governments use financial institutions to shape firms’ domestic and foreign investments in pursuit of structural economic transformation.
The Kellogg Institute celebrated the book’s publication at a September 15 launch featuring Sierra, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame, in conversation with Ben Ross Schneider of MIT and Dan Slater of the University of Michigan. The event was cosponsored by Notre Dame’s Department of Political Science.
“The central message of this book,” Sierra said, is that “late developers across the Global South have transformed their strategies for structural transformation, but they didn’t renounce the ambition for structural transformation.”
Both discussants described the book as agenda-setting, emphasizing how it places the internationalization of national firms at the center of the study of industrial policy. Schneider noted that although countries such as Brazil, China, and India have used firm internationalization as part of their development strategies, the phenomenon has received surprisingly little scholarly attention. The book, he said, “really stakes out this topic as an important agenda for research.”
Slater echoed that assessment. “It really brings internationalization into comparative politics in such an effective way,” he said. “I think it makes comparative politics bigger.”
At the heart of the book is a puzzle: globalization has narrowed some of the tools governments traditionally used for industrial policy, while democracy subjects state intervention to greater public scrutiny and political contestation. How, under those conditions, can governments continue to pursue ambitious strategies of economic transformation?
Sierra’s explanation centers on what she calls a “developmentalist legacy”: the survival of policymakers committed to structural transformation and state financial institutions capable of directing investment. Where that combination persists, she argues, governments can devise new ways of supporting national firms even as their economies become more open and globally integrated.
Rather than treating the market reforms of the late twentieth century as simply displacing earlier forms of state-led development, Sierra traces how developmental ideas and institutions persisted, changed, and were repurposed for a globalized economy. Schneider described the book’s analysis of ideas as a major theoretical contribution, emphasizing its reconstruction of how policymakers developed and debated new strategies of structural transformation.
Slater likewise praised the book for showing that the earlier era of developmentalism “still really matters” and that neoliberalism did not simply “wipe it out everywhere.”
The book also examines the effects of state support for firms’ foreign investments. Sierra shows how patient, risk-taking finance can enable firms to pursue investments they otherwise might avoid, while long-term relationships created through lending and equity investments give governments opportunities to influence business strategy. Her analysis finds that firms receiving state support gained greater access to foreign markets and knowledge through their overseas investments.
Schneider emphasized the book’s focus on firms as a distinctive contribution to the study of industrial policy. Scholarship, he noted, often focuses on governments, sectors, or policy instruments while paying less attention to the firms through which those policies operate. “All of the industrial policies in today’s capitalist world are going to have to run through private firms,” he said.
The book also examines the political conditions under which states can support firms’ global expansion. Such policies can generate tensions over jobs, public resources, environmental consequences, and the growing economic and political power of multinational companies. In Brazil, Sierra finds that unions, social movements, and other actors challenged aspects of BNDES policy and pushed the government to respond.
Rather than concluding that democratic contestation makes state-led development impossible, Sierra argues that it can also reshape and sometimes improve industrial policy. In Brazil, increasing scrutiny contributed to greater transparency, greater attention to social and environmental consequences, and a shift toward more market-oriented financial instruments.
“State-led development can operate under democracy,” Sierra said. “It’s going to be a fragile autonomy, but maybe that’s not such a bad thing.”
Schneider identified the relationship between democracy and industrial policy as another important contribution. “This book really … hits a nerve in contemporary discussions,” he said. “People really haven’t figured this out, about how to combine democracy and industrial policy.”
Slater, for his part, emphasized the book’s comparative contribution, particularly its analysis of China. China pursued similar developmental goals under a dramatically different political system. Sierra said she was struck by the similarities in policy debates across Brazil and China, even as China’s political and financial institutions allowed state-backed internationalization to proceed on a much larger scale.
Schneider closed on a broader note of praise, calling Globalized State-led Development “a wonderful new book.” “The arguments convince, the story is compelling, the prose flows, the pieces all fit together,” he said.
The launch also marked the culmination of a project Sierra said had been shaped by the Kellogg community. The institute supported the book through research assistance, a book workshop, cover and editing expenses, and the launch event.
Sierra thanked Kellogg for providing not only “very strong financial support for this project,” but also “a really beautiful intellectual community that helped bring this project to fruition.”
Video from the September 15 book launch is available here.