Insights and Lessons from East Asia’s Economic Experience

Over the precedent five decades, the most illustrative instance of structural transformation is East Asia’s economic experience. At a time when ideological orientation clinched the policies and strategies that countries pursued the East Asian miracle stood out as an instance that did not allow economic progress to be shackled either by the demarcations of ideologue or the scarcity of natural resources. Instead, it added a new dimension of thinking to the meaning of resources generation by illustrating that countries need not be constricted by the endowments that they lacked because it is the initiatives to harness resources that ultimately steer the course of economic progress. The purpose of this chapter would be to cull out those lessons and aspects from the region’s narrative of rapid economic aspect that maybe relevant for contemporary developing nations. This chapter will analyse the dynamics of investment, productivity and economic growth that underpinned East Asia’s trailblazing economic success that began with Japan during the sixties and continued thereafter to spearhead the nations of Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore to levels of development that not many would have envisaged.