Newly Industrialising Countries in an Interdependent World

Abstract

HERE IS now a good deal of excellent literatur that document the increasing role of developing countries in world trade in manufactures.' Treating developing countries as a whole or using regional classifications, without country data, however, leaves open the possibility that all developing countries are seen as moving along a similar path and participating relatively (or potentially) evenly in the growth in manufactured exports. In fact, the country experiences have been quite different. In an earlier study based on the period 1966-73, Bela Balassa, of John Hopkins University, noted that twelve countries accounted for 84 per cent of the exports of manufactured goods from developing countries in 1973 and that 'no other developing country accounted for more than three per cent of the total'.' RISE OF THE NEWLY INDUSTRIALISING COUNTRIESIn the period since 1973 there has been a further narrowing of the range of developing countries that are significant exporters of manufactures on a global scale. By 1976, the Republic of Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore accounted for over 90 per cent of the manufactured exports from East Asia; India, 75 per cent of manufactured exports from South Asia; and Brazil, Mexico and Argentina, 70 per cent of Latin America's industrial exports. Together, these eight newly industrialising countries accounted for over three quarters of the manufactured exports from the developing world in 1976.3 There has been a considerable gap between these eight countries and what could be called the 'next tier' of developing countries, with Colombia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Pakistan and Thailand having been the

High Technology, World Development, and Structural Transformation: The Trends and the Debate

“…Yet, along with the multinationals, small and medium companies from the newly industrializing periphery, as in Hong Kong (Chen, 1979;Schiffer, 1983), Korea or Taiwan (Browett, 1985), followed a similar strategy of producing for the world market on the basis of their comparative advantage of low-production costs. It followed a realignment of the world economy, an ,intensification of world trade, and the surge of a group of newly industrialized countries (Browett, 1985;Bradford, 1982;Bienefeld and Godfrey, 1982). So, through a combination of decentralization of productive investment from the core, and of dynamism of indigenous capital in the periphery supported by development-oriented national governments, new economic actors have entered the international arena, increasingly differentiating the so-called Third World.…”