Industrial restructuring and early industry pathways in the Asian 1st generation NICs: The Singapore garment industry

This article aims to contribute to an understanding of the industrial dynamics/evolution of mature export production complexes in the first generation Asian NICs, employing an evolutionary economic perspective. Over the past decade and longer the first generation Asian NICs, Singapore included, have been confronted with imperatives necessitating deep restructuring. We observe that industrial decline, associated with failed restructuring caused by lock-in, does not fit these countries, its industrial regions and early industries. Yet research has hardly begun to look at adjustment and address deeper evolution from tenets in the framework of evolutionary economics although such an approach is made not less but rather more relevant by continued resilience. We analyse the pathway(s) of one early industry, i.c. the apparel industry, in Singapore, through the 1980s and 1990s. The withering away in the Singapore context of an industry such as apparel is not inevitable. From a juxtaposition of the line of thinking in evolutionary economics emphasizing hindrance and decline due to path dependency and lock-ins with an alternative line emphasizing the possibility to adjust through renewal and the limited operation of lock-ins, we argue why the latter rather than the former has been the case.