Outward-looking growth strategies in East Asia: rationale and success

Decades of rapid growth have made Asia an important part of the global economy. Three of the world’s ten largest economies are in Asia (China, Japan, and Korea), and the region now accounts for almost one-third of global output and nearly half of recent world economic growth. From this perspective, the Asian financial crisis, which wreaked havoc on the region during 1997-98, now appears as only a temporary deviation from Asia’s remarkable growth record. The same can be said of the more recent global financial crisis (GFC) of 2008-09. Indeed, in both cases, per-capita income levels in most of the crisis-afflicted countries returned to pre-crisis levels relatively quickly.