ABSTRACT
The second-tier Southeast Asian newly industrialising countries (SEANICs) have recorded substantial manufacturing growth since the 1970s, which, especially since the 1970s in Malaysia and since the second half of the 1980s in Thailand and Indonesia, has been led by rapid export growth. Some economists have considered their achievement to be a result of following the sequence of rapid export-led growth in the Asian newly industrialised economies (NIEs) of South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong. To proponents of Akamatsu’s (1962) flying geese model, Southeast Asia forms the second follow-up group in a sequential process following the leading goose, Japan, and the first follow-up group of first-tier Asian NIEs (e.g. Kojima 1977). This pattern is assumed to have spread to other economies in Southeast Asia. Such a model also assumes that regional economies are unlikely to generate synergic effects in sites far from their borders.
