ABSTRACT
The literature on the ‘Taiwan Model’ and its replicability has grown rapidly
during the past two decades, and the interest shown in Taiwan by other countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America shows little sign of diminishing.1
This interest is hardly surprising – the Taiwanese experience has indeed
been remarkable. A country whose per capita GDP in the early 1950s was
about the same as that of the Philippines and Thailand, and lower than that
of several African countries, by 1990 had caught up to the point Japan had
reached in the latter part of the 1970s.2 This rate of growth of GDP was
remarkable for a country that was, in 1945, seen as a poor and undeveloped
agricultural appendage of Japan. Furthermore, the evidence indicates that this took place at the same time as the distribution of household incomes
became more equal. Although in Taiwan, as in several OECD countries,
income distribution has become more skewed since the early 1980s, there
seems little doubt that between the early 1950s and the early 1980s, rapid
growth in Taiwan was accompanied by a decline in income inequality.3
