The newly industrializing economies of East Asia

In most ESCAP studies and the Survey, Taiwan Province of China and the Republic of Korea, along with Hong Kong, China; and Singapore, have generally been grouped together as first-generation newly industrializing economies because of their fast-track export-based industrialization, the development of which most closely resembled that of Japan. However, it seems more reasonable to treat only the first two economies as belonging to this category. The other two are much more special cases that illustrate the phenomenon of the East Asian “miracle economies”; moreover, Singapore belongs to a different geographical subregion, namely South-East Asia. Both Hong Kong, China; and Singapore were, at least initially, entrepôt and enclave economies, a large portion of whose exports consisted of re-exports from neighbouring countries, as they were major centres in the region for shipping. Being small, both in population and area, their GDP was derived mainly from services rather than industry or agriculture. As such, they have often been considered as atypical examples of East Asian development, unlike the Republic of Korea and Taiwan Province of China, both of which were heavily influenced in their development strategy by the Japanese occupation that began towards the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Related Subject(s): Economic and Social Development