ABSTRACT
It seems somewhat quixotic for me (with my young colleagues) to present a chapter in this volume on the topic ‘facilitating domestic investment and growth’.1 First, a number of East Asian countries have in fact been very successful in generating high investment rates and attracting substantial foreign investments. Given this, it is a bit presumptuous to come up with a set of recommendations on facilitating domestic investment and growth for East Asia, except possibly for a few laggards like the Philippines, the country that I come from. Second, the economics profession seems to be in limbo and unsure of itself and its prescriptions if the policies-versusinstitutions debate in the academic literature is any guide. It does appear that the heterodox leaders of the successful economies (e.g. China, Vietnam, Korea and Taiwan in the 1960s and the 1970s) have been far smarter than the battalions of PhD economists in many of the leading universities in the world.
