ABSTRACT
A debate has emerged about the sources of economic growth in South Korea and Taiwan: did it all begin around 1960, when both had miniscule per capita incomes but somehow launched themselves onto a trajectory of export-led growth, or do the origins of growth push back further, into the legacies of Japan’s colonial rule? That debate also bears on the export-led plans of a different former colony, at a very different time: Vietnam in the 1990s.
