The East Asian Miracle

Abstract

The East Asian success in economic catch-up has been long acknowledged, and was described as the East Asian Miracle in the well-known World Bank study in 1993. The World Bank report covered eight high-performing East Asian economies: Japan; the ‘Four Tigers’: Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea; and the three newly industrializing economies (NIEs) of Southeast Asia, Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia. During the four decades between 1950 and 1990, these economies, on average, had delivered even higher real GDP growth than the Soviet Union in its peak years. Consequently, Japan, already an industrial economy before the War, had rapidly rose to the rank of the world’s second largest economy. The Four Tigers, following Japan’s state-led export-oriented development model, have succeeded in modernization and raised their per capita income to the levels of the OECD countries towards the end of the twentieth century. The NIEs that took the same development approach have also significantly narrowed their income gaps with the Western industrial economies.