Dwight H. Perkins is Harold Hitchings Burbank Professor of Political Economy, Emeritus, at Harvard University.
During the past half century, the global economy’s most impressive
growth engines have largely resided in East and Southeast Asia. To
explain the extraordinary performance of these Asian economies,
Perkins draws on academic research and on his own decades-long
experience as an adviser to developing countries. It comes as no
surprise that the explanations vary over time and from economy to
economy. Also unsurprising is the good deal of attention that
Perkins pays to China, the largest of the economies examined (India
and the rest of South Asia are not included). Perkins predicts that
China’s outsized economic growth will decline significantly in the
years ahead, perhaps to an annual rate of five percent, which would
still be high by world standards. He also helpfully places China in
the context of other successful Asian countries, in which, Perkins
argues, high growth has been aided by a strong emphasis on
education. Asian countries’ development of their nonagricultural
labor forces has also played an important role, as has their steady
engagement with the global economy.
*Foreign Affairs*
Perkins marries an ability to write intelligibly for a popular
audience to a decent grounding in the historical background of
Asian societies and polities. Examining cross-national economic
development in the two regions over the past half century, Perkins
notes that sensational rates of growth have characterized not only
Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China, but also
Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, and Singapore. His analysis of what
accounts for such success begins with broad brushstrokes of
regional history; brings up the general relevance of quantitative
economic yardsticks of growth; and discusses the role of state
intervention in fostering or hindering growth. Separate attention
is then devoted to China and Vietnam and their tortuous journey
from Soviet-style command systems to market economies. The book
thus serves well as a historically sensitive, comparative primer on
the economic dynamics of East and Southeast Asia.
*Choice*
The topic of East Asian development is an almost irresistible
magnet for over-strong assertions and facile generalizations. In
this analysis informed by a long career working on the region,
Dwight Perkins provides the necessary antidote. Even specialists
will learn much from Professor Perkins’s deeply contextualized,
historically-informed comparisons.
*Barry Eichengreen, author of Exorbitant Privilege: The Rise and
Fall of the Dollar and the Future of the International Monetary
System*
A remarkable tour de force. Drawing upon a wealth of knowledge and
experience accumulated through close engagement with East Asia
during an extraordinarily eventful half century, Dwight Perkins
presents a panoramic overview of the region’s economic
transformation from the 1950s onwards. His brisk, lucid, and finely
textured account of rapid progress in some countries and mixed
outcomes in others is a must read. Students seeking to understand
East Asia’s remarkable economic performance will find this a highly
readable one-stop volume; experts will be amply rewarded by the
author’s many penetrating insights into the political economy of
policymaking and its implementation in the East Asian context.
*Shahid Yusuf, George Washington University*
 |
Ask a Question About this Product More... |
|
