The East Asian Development Experience: The Miracle, the Crisis and the Future

by Ha-Joon Chang

Today East Asia is the richest part of the world outside the old industrial centres of Western Europe and North America. Despite political authoritarianism, human rights violations, corruption, repression of labour unions, gender discrimination and mistreatment of ethnic minorities, the citizens of the East Asian economies have experienced improvements in income and general well-being unparalleled in human history.

In this book, Ha-Joon Chang provides a fresh analysis of this spectacular growth. He considers East Asian economies' unorthodox methods, and their rejection of 'best practice' and so-called Washington Consensus policies. East Asia, he claims, can teach us much about the whole process of economic development. Full of new facts and policy suggestions, this is a lively and unconventional introduction to a global phenomenon.

Genres: Economics, History, China, Asia, Academic, Economic Development, Nonfiction

310 pages, Paperback

First published September 19, 2006

About the author

Ha-Joon Chang is a South Korean institutional economist, specializing in development economics. Currently he is a reader in the Political Economy of Development at the University of Cambridge.

Reviews

[Tam]

Not really about "East Asian Development" in general but mostly just Korean development experience. Nevertheless, it is a clear, brief, easy-to-read account. I could not say I completely agree with everything, but overall it has some strong arguments. Moreover, this book is not a thoroughly and comprehensively investigation. It is in fact a re-cap. Economics students interested in the validity of the argument would have to look somewhere else, more specialized journal articles. But keep in mind that this is unorthodox economics.

[Yash Sanghvi]

Was expecting more focus on patterns of industrial policy in East Asian countries, but was plesantly surprised by depth of analysis on the Korean perspective of the 1997 Asian financial crisis.