East Asia S Other Miracle

This volume provides highly illuminating, analytic perspectives on key facets of the East Asian economies. It discusses weaknesses in the financial sector, corporate governance, exchange rate and trade policies, regulatory capability, and proposes remedies. Rethinking the East Asian Miracle is an indispensable book for all those with an interest in East Asia's prospects in the early decades of the new century.

Mass atrocities were once a common occurrence in East Asia. Yet, over the past three decades, mass atrocities have declined in East Asia to the point of near elimination. This book explains how and why.

"Easily the most informed and comprehensive analysis to date on how and why East Asian countries have achieved sustained high economic growth rates, [this book] substantially advances our understanding of the key interactions between the governors and governed in the development process. Students and practitioners alike will be referring to Campos and Root's series of excellent case studies for years to come." Richard L. Wilson, The Asia Foundation Eight countries in East Asia--Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia--have become known as the "East Asian miracle" because of their economies' dramatic growth. In these eight countries real per capita GDP rose twice as fast as in any other regional grouping between 1965 and 1990. Even more impressive is their simultaneous significant reduction in poverty and income inequality. Their success is frequently attributed to economic policies, but the authors of this book argue that those economic policies would not have worked unless the leaders of the countries made them credible to their business communities and citizens. Jose Edgardo Campos and Hilton Root challenge the popular belief that East Asia's high performers grew rapidly because they were ruled by authoritarian leaders. They show that these leaders had to collaborate with various sectors of their population to create an environment that was conducive to sustained growth. This required them to persuade the business community that their investments would not be expropriated and to convince the broader population that their short-term sacrifices would be rewarded in the future. Many of the countries achieved business cooperation by creating consultative groups, which the authors call deliberation councils, to enhance accountability and stability. They also obtained popular support through a variety of wealth-sharing measures such as land reform, worker cooperatives, and wider access to education. Finally, to inhibit favoritism and corruption that would benefit narrow interest groups at the expense of broad-based development, these countries' leaders constructed a competent bureaucracy that balanced autonomy with accountability to serve all interests, including the poor. This important book provides useful lessons about how developing and newly industrialized countries can build institutions to implement growth-promoting policies.

"The debate on the major factors contributing to Southeast Asian industrialization continues unabated. As might be expected, there is much at stake in this debate. The debate is largely ideological in nature and partly centers on the role and contribution of state interventions and other institutions in market processes in the context of late industrialization. At the risk of caricaturing the debate, on the one hand, one finds the dominant and more influential position held by those who blame the state for all that has gone wrong and credit the market for all that has turned out right; on the other hand, the minority statist extreme position basically credits most major economic achievements in East Asia to appropriate interventions by developmentalist states. While very few people would actually fully identify with either of these caricatured extremes, much of the discussion actually gravitates around either of these poles. "

The current economic crisis in East Asia is unprecedented in world economic history. It seemed the economic strength of the region, until very recently, would just keep growing. Now, the macroeconomic achievements of Asia are under threat and the economies of North America and Europe are feeling the results. This book brings together the thoughts of leading experts on the Asian economy and provides a broad and thorough analysis of the situation. It provides case studies from fourteen countries in the region, how the crisis developed and affected them, and the response from governments. There are other non-country specific chapters with a strong theoretical content which address issues such as causation, how such a crisis should be handled, how it might be avoided in the future, and the likely implications for on-going deregulatory and other economic reforms. This is an important authoritative account of one of the most extraordinary economic events and provides a broad synthesis of case studies and theoretical approaches from a variety of researchers with an intimate knowledge of the region.

There is widespread agreement that the world's most successful developing countries in the 1980s were those in Southeast Asia. Following in the footsteps of postwar Japan and more recently Korea, the populations of Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Hong Kong, and the Philippines have made enormous strides in income, industrial and agricultural production, exports, education, health, nutrition, consumption, and other development indicators. This book brings together political scientists, economists, officials of Asian governments, the United States, and representatives of the multilateral banks to analyze and explain Southeast Asia's extraordinary growth. Chapters and contributors to The Southeast Asian Economic Miracle include: "Recent Developments and Future Prospects of Indonesia" by Anwar Nasution; "The Economic Experience and Prospects of Thailand" by Sukhumbhand Paribatra; "The Development of the Former Indochina States" by Frederick Brown; "Trade and Investment in Southeast Asian Development" by Stephen Parker; and "Managing Renewable Resources in Southeast Asia: The Problem of Deforestation" by Gareth Porter. Among the critical questions that the contributors address are: Is the success of the 1980s and early 1990s a permanent part of the world's economic landscape? How will this region react to the growth of China's vast productive capacity and to the faltering of Japan's economy? What will be the effect of U.S. military disengagement caused by domestic budgetary concerns and the end of the cold war? The Southeast Asian Economic Miracle is an important study of the shifting winds of the political economy of growth in our time—the movement away from a command to a free market environment. It will be an essential resource for political scientists, Asia area scholars, economists, and policymakers.

Revised and Expanded Second Edition. Concise yet comprehensive, Zhiqun Zhu's book is the perfect introduction to the political economy of East Asia for undergraduate and advanced high school classes. Zhu's analysis of the economic 'miracles' of Japan, South Korea, China and Taiwan takes into account both domestic factors and the international environment, and is sensitive to the similarities as well as differences between the developmental experiences of these nations. Zhu raises important related issues such as the connections between economic development and democratization, the relative economic contributions of the state and the market, and the portability of the East Asian developmental model. East Asia's diverse but dynamic experience is valuable precisely because it demonstrates that developing nations need not follow a single approach to prosperity. An excellent book to assign for courses on Asia.

This book analyses the growth, development and crisis experiences of the Southeast Asian economies, in particular, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand - also known as ASEAN-5. The proposition is developed that the robust economic performance of the Southeast Asian economies during the past four decades has been attributed to the various factors, developments and independent national policies which have been pursued by the individual member countries rather than to any regional economic framework. The book covers eleven topics which is suitable for a one-semester course on the economics of Southeast Asia. Also, it has a narrower area coverage as it focuses only on the five economies, namely, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand. The sectoral treatment of the crisis impact and the analytical treatment of policy responses to the crisis differentiate this book from other publications on the same topic. Finally, this book provides an analysis of national developments, policies and factors which have contributed to the economic transformation of the respective Southeast Asian economies.