Economic Development In Southeast Asia

It is well known that Taiwan and South Korea, both former Japanese colonies, achieved rapid growth and industrialization after 1960. The performance of former European and American colonies (Malaysia, Singapore, Burma, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Indonesia, and the Philippines) has been less impressive. Some scholars have attributed the difference to better infrastructure and greater access to education in Japan’s colonies. Anne Booth examines and critiques such arguments in this ambitious comparative study of economic development in East and Southeast Asia from the beginning of the twentieth century until the 1960s. Booth takes an in-depth look at the nature and consequences of colonial policies for a wide range of factors, including the growth of export-oriented agriculture and the development of manufacturing industry. She evaluates the impact of colonial policies on the growth and diversification of the market economy and on the welfare of indigenous populations. Indicators such as educational enrollments, infant mortality rates, and crude death rates are used to compare living standards across East and Southeast Asia in the 1930s. Her analysis of the impact that Japan’s Greater Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere and later invasion and conquest had on the region and the living standards of its people leads to a discussion of the painful and protracted transition to independence following Japan’s defeat. Throughout Booth emphasizes the great variety of economic and social policies pursued by the various colonial governments and the diversity of outcomes. Lucidly and accessibly written, Colonial Legacies offers a balanced and elegantly nuanced exploration of a complex historical reality. It will be a lasting contribution to scholarship on the modern economic history of East and Southeast Asia and of special interest to those concerned with the dynamics of development and the history of colonial regimes. An electronic version of this book is freely available thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched, a collaborative initiative designed to make high-quality books open access for the public good. The open-access version of this book is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which means that the work may be freely downloaded and shared for non-commercial purposes, provided credit is given to the author. Derivative works and commercial uses require permission from the publisher.

Monograph on the role of Chinese ethnic groups in South East Asia's economic development - discusses emigration, evolution of commercial enterprise, national level attitudes, geographic distribution, social institutions, the contribution of entrepreneurship, human resources and capital resources, regional development, comments on racial discrimination, restrictive government policies and legislation affecting their businesses and labour force, and includes economic implications, trends and recommendations. Graphs, references and statistical tables.

First published in 1964, The Economic Development of South-East Asia: Studies in economic history and political economy contains eight papers originally written for a study group at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. The papers, edited by Professor C. D. Cowan, are written against a background of economic underdevelopment in large parts of Asia. Economic problems increasingly plagued the governments of Asia after the Second World War, and while Western governments were willing to help foster economic development, relations with Asian governments were somewhat hindered by the heritage of their colonial past. Problems also related to the growth of traditional trading ports and export crops, and to the importation of colonial regimes, western funds and skills in the nineteenth century. Such developments come under the loosely generalised concept of imperialism, with its strongly emotional overtones, whose use impedes the objective assessment and analysis of facts. While we understand a good deal about conditions of economic growth in the West, much of what has fostered or retarded growth in other parts of the world remains less clear.

South Asian leaders have made it a priority to tackle key regional issues such as poverty, environment degradation, trade and investment barriers and food insecurity, among others.

This book examines five countries in South East Asia that are instructive case studies of how the region has had to negotiate pathways of development beyond crises and traps. At two ends of just one decade, 1997–2007, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam all had to weather the shocks of an East Asian financial crisis and a global financial crisis. Some economies might have buckled completely under those shocks and been condemned to long-term stagnation. Yet these five economies, part of the larger Asian region, emerged with continued if slower economic growth. An important theme of this book is that their resilience has been partly derived from the pursuit of growth and competitiveness along less known or recommended pathways. The chapters of this book take a novel approach to South East Asia’s search for growth and improvement. They do not begin by evaluating how far macro-level performances would take a particular country towards high-income status. Instead they provide original insights into actual cases of intermediate ways of achieving growth, upgrading and income improvement in non-privileged sectors. Such cases may hold more relevant lessons for the majority of developing countries than the experiences of highly developed economies.

This updated and revised edition provides an examination of issues of paramount importance for Southeast Asian economies, such as the economic implications of the 1997 Asian crisis for both older and newer members of ASEAN.

"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. "

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, the book provides an analysis of national developments, policies and factors which have contributed to the economic transformation of the respective Southeast Asian economies.