Introduction

Abstract

There have been a number of East Asian miracles, with almost every nation in the region achieving rapid economic growth, as crudely measured by output of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) over the course of a short period of time. While Japan was the forerunner of a specifically Asian approach to high speed industrialization and economic development, becoming the world’s second largest economy by 1968, South Korea followed an equally compressed revolution, moving from Third World status in 1961 to joining the globe’s leading OECD economies by 1996. While other countries have followed or are following a similar path, China has been the latest, and biggest, of the miracle economies, following deep market restructuring since the end of the 1970s, with Indonesia now widely tipped as a significant emerging economy.