ABSTRACT
The great success stories of economic development in the last decade have been the newly industrializing countries (NICs) of East Asia, especially the so-called “Four Tigers” (South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore) and, increasingly, Thailand and China. In these countries, rapid growth of manufactured exports has produced dramatic increases in income. Their successes have changed the prevailing sentiment in development policy from “export pessimism” to “export optimism.” Throughout the 1980s, international development agencies such as the World Bank and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) urged all less developed countries (LDCs) to follow the East Asian NIC model by adopting a development strategy based on export promotion.
