ABSTRACT
Japan and South Korea have long been touted as the stellar examples of successful economic transformation since the end of World War II. Despite poor factor endowment and devastating legacies of the Pacific war, Japan has emerged as an economic superpower in a relatively short time. South Korea has also shown a remarkable pathway from the periphery by becoming the eleventh largest economy in the world as well as joining the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in 1996. Their economic success has offered a rich empirical research site for refuting the Anglo-American model, while supporting the thesis of the ‘lateindustrialization’ model (Amsden 1989). By neo-classical economic standards, indeed, the economic performance of Japan and South Korea in the past four decades, along with Singapore and Taiwan, is rather anomalous. Such anomaly has stirred new debates on Asian capitalism (Krugman 1994; Lucas 1993).
