Catch-Up Industrialization: The Trajectory and Prospects of East Asian Economies

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By Akira Suehiro

Catch-Up Industrialization is an innovative examination of how the political ideology of "developmentalism" has driven East Asian economic growth. The author considers innovative production and management techniques, the patterns of industrial relations, and the way education shapes the workforce, using this information to assess late 20th century East Asian economic development based on economic liberalization and the rapid diffusion of information technology.

The term "catch-up" links developing and developed countries, and defines the socioeconomic mindset common to high-growth societies of Asia. The author's argument differs from neoclassical approaches emphasizing the workings of the market, statist ones emphasizing policy rather than private initiatives, business studies lacking macroeconomic and global perspectives, work by development economists based on agriculture, and World Bank/IMF studies that lack socio-cultural and historical understanding.

"This revised English language edition is especially welcome as it offers non-Japanese speakers access to the work of a scholar who has long been making significant contributions to debates on East Asian development issues...This is certainly an impressive achievement of synthesis and will interest a range of disciplinary specialists, albeit some more than others." - Andrew Brown

"Akira Suehiro has written an excellent book, that tells about East Asian's failures and successes, highs and lows, destiny and doom, ideologies and innovations, based on rich data that he himself has collected in case studies, especially from Thailand...He takes us pretty far towards understanding how the world can be expected to change after the 2008 golbal financial crisis." - Alice H. Amsden


Akira SUEHIRO is Professor in the Institute of Social Science at the University of Tokyo, Japan.


Publication Year: 2008
416 pages, 229mm x 153mm 
ISBN: 978-9971-69-383-1, Paperback


NUS Press and Kyoto University Press