Economic development

Economic developmental strategy, ever since the process of decolonisation, was and still is even today a heated point of debate. The degree to which people are incensed over any certain element in the debate could only be intensified, given the human experience of economic development within various nations in Asia and the Third World throughout the Cold War. In the Western world too, due to the long dominance of politics and political by the duality of left-wing and right-wing thought, any discussion on political economy and development tends to take on an ideological flavouring and as such remains a very controversial topic.

History
One of the biggest conundrums of the 20th century was how, in so short a space of time, nations along the Asian Pacific coast managed to modernise and develop into fully matured industrial economies, whereas their other counterparts have had yet to emerge until the beginning of the 21st. While it can be argued that Japan also had to go through a very long period fraught with conflict and problems as any of the North American or European members of the OECD, the modernisation of countries such as Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Singapore just within the span of roughly fifty years is also puzzling. Even more contradictory with what most traditionalists, liberal and nationalist alike, is also the fact that some of the countries described above, have had little or no true indigenous resources such as minerals or agricultural produce to begin building up with, which makes it all the more baffling to the layman’s mind.

The common view in the liberal camp is that where the Asian economies succeeded while their South American and African counterparts failed was in maintaining a system that emphasised the free market, or operated with little or no market intervention (Powell, 2004, pp. 18-19). By a market orientation of the economy, rather than one of import substitution, authors argue (quoted Chan et al, 1998) that it proves that the free-market does work. Running counter too to the development state model too are sociological findings pointing to the pluralist nature of Japanese society and institutions (Moon & Prasad, 1994, quoted Chan, 1998, pp. 11-13)

Yet even this supposed adherence to the tenets of the free market and competitiveness is still not enough, argue the statists who point out that in the cases of Korea and Japan, state bodies have had a hand in economic development. While the Japanese economy developed with the background a relatively free pluralist society (Chan et al., 1998, p. 12) the Korean economy however developed its most crucial components under an authoritarian regime led by Park Chung-Hee (Fukuyama, 1999, p. 143) - not the type of regime most today associate with economic growth, yet undeniably it was under his rule that South Korea came to become the economic powerhouse of our day. Such too was the case of Singapore-basically a bare and empty rock with no real natural resources-but under the leadership of the PAP, Singapore progressed, in Lee Kuan-Yew’s own words, “from poverty to prosperity in three decades (Lee, 2000, p. xiv)”