ABSTRACT
Introduction What was the source of the sound strategies and policy-thinking in Economics in the dynamic Asian economies over the last century and a half, which were to lead them to their rapid economic rise in such a record time-span? This is the most salient question to ask in pursuing this important issue, as we shall soon see, in the chapters that follow in this edited volume. Although there are numerous notable Asian thinkers in the field and efficacious policy concepts that yielded positive results here, Economics, we argue, cannot be regarded as an essentially ‘Asian’ science, as such. We go on to posit that the Economic Ideas, Concepts and Strategies that the dynamic Asian economies deployed, and benefitted from, were essentially Western, principally Anglo-American in origin in recent years, if with associated European influences. They were then successfully gleaned, adapted and adopted by the Asian policy-makers (see the Introductory chapter to this volume). An distinct attempt has been made in this chapter to identify the principal policies from which the Asian economies benefitted, then relate them to theoretical Economics concepts from which they were derived and to the scholars who propounded them. Our objective here is to examine these productive, constructive, innovative, growth-spawning concepts and strategies and explore how they reached the dynamic Asian economies. The theory-driven and policy-relevant overview of the field in this chapter explores the track they were to take. The end of the Second World War, we would argue, is the appropriate point in historical time for this exposition to start and we will work back to the foundations of these developments in the mid-nineteenth century. First, the Japanese economy recovered at a breathtaking pace in 1945 and after a time-lag, a number of dynamic economies of East Asia and South-East Asia grew at a prodigious pace. One Asian economy took off after another from economic stagnancy – to achieve an annual growth rate of 8-10 per cent, or even higher. Sustained and rapid growth with equity, or shared growth, was to be their remarkable achievement. The pace and scale of economic transformation of the dynamic Asian economies were unprecedented (see Das, 2015).
