Trade—The Engine of Growth in East Asia

Abstract

The four Pacific Basin countries of Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Singapore, have each defied the vicious circle of poverty in the post-war years, emerging as dynamic and rapidly growing economies. This book provides a comprehensive analysis of the economic factors that led to the “miracle”. It aims to reveal the sources of economic growth by analyzing the underlying mechanisms and interrelationships of this export success. The authors combine a wide-ranging empirical body of data spanning a full twenty-five years, from the early “take-off” period of the mid-1960s, to the early 1990s with a broad theoretical approach to its analysis. The concept of revealed comparative advantage is utilized. Using Japan's trade performance as a benchmark, this book examines whether the four NICs have gained on or fallen further behind Japan. Not only are detailed product groups examined but such economic factors as specific product characteristics and embodied factor contents are explored. The important issues of intra-industry trade and NIC import-export relationships are also examined, and imports and exports of specific products are forecast. The conclusions reached in this chapter can serve as a guide to likely future developments. The book makes an original contribution by describing international trade data that relates to the evaluation of the extraordinary success of these four countries.

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