ABSTRACT
In the last chapter, both qualitative and quantitative analyses found that Taiwan's economic history offers partial support for particular aspects of the developmental, dependency, statist, and tradeoff perspectives. This history, however, fails to confirm fully the entire range of theoretical expectations derived from each of these prevailing paradigms of political economy. In this chapter, we undertake a series of more specific regression analyses to explore selective arguments presented by the contending models about the causes as well as the consequences of economic growth. We concentrate on the statistical determinants of such policy performance as GNP growth, export expansion, popular wellbeing, and income equity. Because we only study the historical experience of one country, our analysis cannot be generalized cross-nationally to infer either the necessity or the sufficiency of various conditions for the policy desiderata just mentioned. Thus, this study constitutes less of a formal test of the competing empirical models than an attempt to assess the extent to which the longitudinal data from Taiwan fit with some "stylized facts" gleaned from cross-national research in different settings.
