Why do you think that Brazil or India could do it? My reading of Peter Evans's _Embedded Autonomy_ is that the Brazilian government decided that it needed to develop a computer hardware manufacturing capacity, and with heroic efforts over a decade managed to develop the capability to build a computer eight years behind the times at a cost four times what it took Digital Equipment to make it--but that in the meantime every business and consumer in Brazil who wanted to actually *use* computers was very, very heavily taxed. And India's pre-liberalization growth was not impressive at all. (Of course, its post-liberalization change in income distribution has not been impressive either.)
Brad DeLong