The Growth And Rapid Growth Of East Asian Economies

The resilience and rapid-growth of East Asian economies even in the face of rising protectionism in their major export markets and a global recession, has intrigued developmental specialists who see Latin America as a prime candidate for comparison. By becoming increasingly libertarian and by embracing neo-liberalism Latin American countries have sought to emulate the success of East Asian economies. Nevertheless they have found it difficult to maintain their previous levels of growth, confronting piling external debts, high rates of inflation, shortages of investment capital, and the growing social and economic marginalisation of their population. Latin America’s industrialisation can be seen as a decedent of the East Asian model, however†¦show more content†¦These countries differ not only in the timing and trajectories of their development efforts but also in the ways they are linked to the world-system. Geopolitical unions, international debt, foreign aid, DFI, an d foreign trade have played very dissimilar roles in the regional development processes. The capital and labour markets as well as price mechanisms worked very differently in Latin America than in their equivalents in the industrial nations, with only a few underdeveloped countries satisfying the assumptions underlying neoclassical and Keynasian economics. The Northern paradigm of developmental economics proved futile to explain the causes and the persistence of underdevelopment and for proposing policies to overcome these states of affairs. The two regions are the most industrialised in the developing world, with Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina being the Latin American analogues of East Asia s Four Tigers (South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore). The neoclassical economists in their eagerness to dismiss the challenge of rising inequality in the periphery, failed to notice that structuralists were among the first to recognise the limitations of import-substitution industrialisation as it was being implemented in various Latin American countries in an attempt to