Regionalization in East Asia: Implications for Critiquing the Developmental State

Abstract

The East Asian capitalist nations (first Japan and then the four Little Dragons of Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan) have had the fastest growing economies in the world over the postwar period; during the 1980s China and most of the rest of ASEAN (Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand) entered periods of rapid growth; and most recently Vietnam and the Philippines are starting to show signs of economic vitality. East and Southeast Asia's economic success, in turn, stimulated substantial interest in how to explain it; and attention quickly turned to the role of the state. With the exception of Hong Kong, the state intervened in the economy quite extensively throughout the region with the explicit aim of promoting industrialization. Since these economies responded with rapid growth and economic transformation, it was not only a short step of induction to conclude that state leadership was a major (and probably the key) factor explaining the superior economic performance that was observed in East and Southeast Asia. This also fit nicely with an emerging school in the political economy of development for "bringing the state back in" which harkened back to earlier arguments about the need for state leadership to mobilize resources in "late developers.