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In the 1980s and 1990s many in the West came to believe in the myth of an East-Asian economic miracle. Japan was going to dominate, then China. Countries were called “tigers” or “mini-dragons,” and were seen as not just development prodigies, but as a unified bloc, culturally and economically similar, and inexorably on the rise.
Joe Studwell has spent two decades as a reporter in the region, and The Financial Times said he “should be named chief myth-buster for Asian business.” In How Asia Works, Studwell distills his extensive research into the economies of nine countries—Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, Vietnam, and China—into an accessible, readable narrative that debunks Western misconceptions, shows what really happened in Asia and why, and for once makes clear why some countries have boomed while others have languished.
Studwell’s in-depth analysis focuses on three main areas: land policy, manufacturing, and finance. Land reform has been essential to the success of Asian economies, giving a kick start to development by utilizing a large workforce and providing capital for growth. With manufacturing, industrial development alone is not sufficient, Studwell argues. Instead, countries need “export discipline,” a government that forces companies to compete on the global scale. And in finance, effective regulation is essential for fostering, and sustaining growth. To explore all of these subjects, Studwell journeys far and wide, drawing on fascinating examples from a Philippine sugar baron’s stifling of reform to the explosive growth at a Korean steel mill.
Thoroughly researched and impressive in scope, How Asia Works is essential reading for anyone interested in the development of these dynamic countries, a region that will shape the future of the world.
- Sales Rank: #71137 in eBooks
- Published on: 2013-07-02
- Released on: 2013-07-02
- Format: Kindle eBook
From Booklist
Why have some East Asian countries been more successful in their economic development than others? Studwell (Asian Godfathers, 2008) argues that the answer comes down to three key sets of policy choices: land-tenure policies that support smallholder farmers, manufacturing policies that subsidize domestic industries yet demand internationally competitive results, and financial policies that support the above by resisting deregulation until it can be done safely. Countries that have done these things (Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan), he notes, have developed more robustly and consistently than those that have not (Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia). And then there’s China, the big work in progress at the center of it all. Drawing upon broad yet consistently engaging historical analysis, as well as some deep dives into World Bank and International Monetary Fund reports, Studwell ultimately wants to dispel some pervasive illusions about the region—that geography is destiny, for example—and to suggest that developing countries would do well to ignore much of the economic-development advice they currently receive from the West. --Brendan Driscoll
Review
“I found the book to be quite compelling. . . . Studwell’s book does a better job than anything else I’ve read of articulating the key role of agriculture in development. . . . A good read for anyone who wants to understand what actually determines whether a developing economy will succeed.”—Bill Gates, “Top 5 Books of the Year”
“Pithy, well-written and intellectually vigorous . . . Studwell’s thesis is bold, his arguments persuasive, and his style pugnacious. It adds up to a highly readable and important book.”—Financial Times
“Provocative. … How Asia Works is a striking and enlightening book … A lively mix of scholarship, reporting and polemic.”—The Economist
"Very readable.... A fascinating and thoroughly deep account."—Bloomberg Radio
“Gripping … Readers will find Studwell’s informative and balanced report eye-opening.”—Publishers Weekly
“Consistently engaging.”—Booklist
“Studwell paints a vivid picture of business life in the region. If a copy of the Korean edition finds its way across the demilitarized zone to Pyongyang … we may find we have yet another Asian Tiger in our midst.”—Management Today
“A solid blend of the descriptive and the prescriptive, with plenty of lessons that will be of interest to Asia hands, investors and policymakers.”—Kirkus Reviews
“Perhaps my favorite economics book of the year. Quite simply, it is the best single treatment on what in Asian industrial policy worked or did not work, full of both analysis and specific detail, and covering southeast Asia in addition to the Asian tiger ‘winners.’ … Definitely recommended, you will learn lots from it, and it will upset people of virtually all ideologies.”—Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution
“An interesting analysis of policy decisions that have and haven’t worked . . . a handy guide for anyone interested in one of the world’s fastest developing regions.”—The Economic Times (India)
“Studwell’s latest book, How Asia Works, is also his most ambitions. . . . Declining to make broad pronouncements or dovetail with doctrine, Studwell demonstrates that the way Asia works isn’t quite as simple as we ever imagined.”—Smart Planet
"A landmark work."—Asia Times (Bangkok)
“Bold and insightful. . . . Essential reading for anyone interested in understanding the ingredients for economic success.”—The News International (Pakistan)
About the Author
Joe Studwell is the founding editor of the China Economic Quarterly. A freelance journalist in Asia for over twenty years, he has also written for the Economist Intelligence Unit, The Economist, The Financial Times, The Asian Wall Street Journal and the The Far Eastern Economic Review. He is the author of The China Dream and Asian Godfathers.
Most helpful customer reviews
26 of 28 people found the following review helpful.
Outstanding!
By Loyd Eskildson
Author Studwell argues that there are three critical interventions that governments can use to speed up economic development. Used in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and now China, they have produced the quickest progressions from poverty to wealth that the world has seen.
The first and most overlooked is to maximize output from agriculture. The second is to direct investment and entrepreneurs towards manufacturing exports. Machines can easily be purchased on the world market, and successful east-Asian governments promoted technological upgrading through subsidies conditioned on export performance. (Exporters were almost invariably better businesses than firms that sold only at home.) The third is to focus capital on the fastest possible technology learning and the promise of high long-term profits, not short-term returns and individual consumption. This tends to pit the state against many businessmen and consumers with shorter-term horizons.
Thus, economic development is as simple as one, two, three. Unfortunately, wealthy nations and their economic institutions (the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund) have provided contradictory advice to poor states, despite the fact that no significant economy as ever developed successfully via free-trade and deregulation from the beginning - including the U.S. and Great Britain. Positive intervention has been required in agriculture and manufacturing that fostered early accumulation of capital and technological learning.
Brazil is the only major economy outside east Asia which has grown more than 7%/year for over 25 years. But it crumbled after the 1982 Latin American debt crisis - currency depreciation, inflation, and years of zero growth. Too much of Brazil's earlier growth came from debt that did not translate into a more productive and competitive economy.
Studwell excludes east Asia's failed states - North Korea, Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar, and New Guinea. Their one common characteristic is a failure to trade and interact with the world. He also ignores Asia's two main offshore financial centers - Hong Kong and Singapore because of their lack of an agricultural sector. Micro oil state Brunei and east Asia's gambling center, Macau, are also omitted.
Another key finding is that a large working-age population and proportion increase the possibilities for fast growth. Rapidly declining death rates, especially for children and a rapidly rising work-age population have been a big part of east Asian development success since WWII. Mao boosted population growth in China, telling people there was strength in numbers, while Deng Xiaoping and successors put a stop to that.
The evidence of a positive correlation between total years of education and GDP growth is much weaker than most imagine. The Philippines have the highest levels of tertiary-educated students in southeast Asia, but because more important policy choices were flunked, the country is on the verge of becoming a failed state. Cuba has the world's second-highest literacy rate for children over age 15, and the 6th highest rate of school enrollment. It has inadequate employment opportunities for university graduates, however - one reason 25,000 Cuban physicians take state-subsidized work overseas. Another problem with education - there is too much of the wrong kind - eg. liberal arts. Asian education not only creates a much higher proportion of engineers than most, it also includes a considerable vocational component conducted inside firms and not elite universities.
Political pluralism, rule of law, and democracy are also outside Studwell's scope - again, because the evidence is contradictory. He also ignores geography/climate - most believe colder climates are more conducive to economic success - Studwell, however, points out that the Arabic world's ascension in the early 8th century began in the hot areas of today's Iraq and north Africa, while the famous Tang dynasty operated out of the 'boiling hot Xian' area.
Studwell then goes on to detail the rationale for his thinking - its both interesting and invaluable reading.
21 of 26 people found the following review helpful.
Industrial policy works
By Michael Pettis
This book argues among other things that that protectionism and industry policy are important policy tools for countries at an early stage of development, and that Asian governments have adopted this model with varying degrees of success. Heretical as this claim may be to some, in my opinion it is not even worth debating whether or not the most advanced economies achieved success under "Smithian" conditions.With the possible exception of a few, small trading entrepots, there is not a single example of a country that did. There are rich countries that were "Smithian" (like, laissez-faire Haiti -- if you don't count slaves of course -- in the late 18th Century), but their wealth was unsustainable and they were in no way "advanced" economies.
You can find it all in the works of the brilliant Alexander Hamilton. The "American System" of the early 19th Century was the basis of the economic writings of the German Freidrich List and which went on to influence Germany, Japan (in 1872 one of the leading proponents of the American System, E. Pechine Smith, moved to Tokyo and became the leading adviser to the Mikado on Japan's economic restructuring), and a host of other countries. The three pillars of the American System were infant industry tariffs and subsidies, internal improvements (i.e. infrastructure provided by state and local governments) and a sound system of national finance, with the state playing a leading role.
These are the same pillars that supported the growth of every country that has developed rapidly, and the fact that this is even debated in economic circles suggests to me how unreal academic economics has become and how divorced from historical understanding. I agree with the authors that to debate whether or not industrial policy can work is silly. Of course it can. The real interesting question is to figure out under what conditions it is wealth enhancing and under what conditions it is wealth destroying. This is why the debate is so important for China. The Chinese growth model clearly "worked", I would argue, in the 1980s and 1990s, although in part simply because it involved a rejection of the insanely inefficient polices of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. Today, in my opinion, it clearly no longer "works". So why did it sometimes help and sometimes hinder Chinese development?
Unfortunately it is very hard to debate this question because most economists are either ideologically committed to the idea that it is almost always a bad idea (the consensus in economics) or to the idea that it is always the right approach (perhaps the consensus in political economy or economic history). The truth, however,may be that sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. Although I don't always agree with Joe Studwell's conclusions. this book does a great job of teasing out the important and relevant issues.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
Brilliantly done
By James R. Maclean
This book is an exceptionally lucid history of development policy in the major economies of East Asia. There is particular focus on the economies of South Korea, Malaysia, and the Philippines, but Studwell addresses other nations as well.
Understandably, development policy is an explosively controversial topic, and readers will be divided by prejudice on this matter. For decades, "the Washington Consensus" (WC) has been pushed onto less developed countries (LDCs) as an unworkable combination of "free trade," currency convertibility, and "stable exchange rates" (1). At the same time, building up a strong farming sector plays a far greater role in the Asian success stories than "liberalization" of FDI.
Readers may be astonished to see how much attention Studwell pays to farming policy in the history of Asian development, seeing as how the prominent successes for countries like Japan, South Korea, and China have been in manufacturing. But sustaining the needs of the population and allowing them to save is a paramount step for any metric of economic success. For instance, when countries are developing, a failed agricultural policy (and concomitant food imports) can suck up foreign capital required for capital projects. Als, as in the case of the Philippines, failures to implement land reform can result in a powerful landed aristocracy upon which the national leadership is completely dependent (2).
After addressing farm policy, he moves on to the challenge of industrial development. He points out that "liberal" trade policy is incontrovertibly unsuited to industrial development(3), but also that competition and export discipline are crucial ingredients of success. Hence, the success of South Korea's industrialization, with massive redundancy of industrial output (multiple car makers, for example, where only one would be ultimately successful), as opposed to Malaysia's doomed reliance on a single national champion. Korea, Japan, and China would also impose rigorous obligations to export on their domestic producers.
Chapter three addresses the role of finance in successful development policy. Studwell's careful marshaling of the evidence suggests that there is really nothing to be gained from a liberal, lightly-regulated financial sector. Liberalized financial sectors are prone to massive swings in asset valuations, as occurred in Thailand in 1997. Indeed, the crisis hit South Korea in large measure because that country had moved to curb the power of the _chaebols_ by concentrating financial power in capital markets and NBFIs (4).
The Korean financial system created systemic risk for the South Korean economy that had not existed before, but for South East Asian economies, the financial system has amounted to another colonial power, suppressing any possible means these countries might have had of taking control of their economic destinies.
The chapter on China is excellent, although a bit short--most readers will feel it is suitably concise, without any damaging shortcuts. I feel there is some shortchanging of environmental issues (although it's not clear that neoliberalism is any better for air quality!), and the risks the Asian economies pose to each other: China's rise, for example, has posed extreme challenges to budding signs of life in the industrial economies of "other" Asia, not to mention Latin America. However, this book is a brilliant piece of work, with exceptionally thorough documentation and excellent writing.
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UPDATE (25 December 2013): After writing this review, I noticed a passage in Stuckler & Basu, The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills (2013) on the response of various East Asian nations to the Asian Currency Crisis (1997). While the Government of Malaysia gets low marks by Studwell for its management of economic development, it gets high marks from Stuckler & Basu for its management of health services during the crisis.
When the crisis hit, Malaysian PM Mahathir Mohamad rejected IMF "assistance" because of the conditions imposed (B&S, pp.45-47); these conditions included massive budget cuts, so that the Asian economies would continue to run budget surpluses. The cuts invariably stimulated massive poverty, as intended by the IMF. Malaysia suffered the same dire collapse of GDP as its neighbors: 34%, compared to 30% in South Korea, 27% in Thailand, 56% in Indonesia, and so on. But Malaysia did not suffer a major increase in poverty, while South Korea's poverty rate doubled (11% in 1997 to 23% in 1998). Health care outcomes also worsened dramatically in countries following IMF conditions.
None of which is meant to detract from Studwell's book, but I feel this certainly does give a more comprehensive picture of the situation.
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NOTES
(1) For a summary of the ten points of the Washington Consensus (WC), see Wing Thye Woo, "Serious Inadequacies of the Washington Consensus: Misunderstanding the Poor by the Brightest" pp.9-43 in Jan Joost Teunissen & Age Akkerman (editors),Diversity in Development : Reconsidering the Washington Consensus, FONDAD, The Hague, (2004). One crucial aspect of development economists in Western countries is their occupational need to constantly rewrite history, so as to divorce themselves from policy recommendations that turned out badly. The WC is especially convenient in this regard because it includes a combination of policies that can never be implemented concurrently, so the World Bank/IMF can always claim their policies were never implemented correctly.
Specifically, it is impossible to have (a) "liberal" (i.e., "market-determined") interest rates, (b) a "competitive" exchange rate, (c) "liberal" trade, and (d) "liberal" inflows of direct foreign investment--all at the same time. For one thing, (a), (c), and (d) preclude any control over the exchange rate.
(2) The go-to example of failure in this regard is the Philippines, which had the educational achievement necessary for developmental "take-off," but also a class dictatorship in the truest sense of the word--by the latifundias. Studwell hints rather strongly that this was a factor in the failures of Malaysia and Thailand as well.
(3) Ha-Joon Chang and many others have long made the case, in the face of massive bad-faith challenges, that all industrial countries became so under conditions of massively protected infant industries. See, for instance, Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism, The East Asian Development Experience: The Miracle, the Crisis and the Future, and many others. See also Alice Amsden, Escape from Empire: The Developing World's Journey through Heaven and Hell (et alibi). For detailed accounts of European development, see Alfred D. Chandler, Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism, and so on.
(4) As Studwell sagely observes, the adoption of neoliberal economic policies are often (usually) stimulated by real problems and ceiling effects of the prior regime. In Korea, the _chaebol_ naturally resisted state projects for development and sought more lucrative outlets in fields such as real estate. The government of Chun Doo Hwan responded by building up capital markets and non-bank financial institutions (NBFIs). Capital markets, in practice, means investment banks, stock markets, etc. This scheme backfired because the Korean _chaebol_ won control over many of the NBFI. See Studwell, pp.183-184.
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