Emerging Asia: Changes and Challenges—A Second Opinion

The Asian Development Bank's study- Emerging Asia : Changes and Challenges- analyzes the economic and social performance of developing Asia over the last three decades, identifies the reasons why some of its sub-regions have performed better than others and why Asia has generally performed better than the rest of the developing world, and makes projections of Asia's performance over the next three decades under different scenarios. The purpose of this paper is to review the study both by evaluating its characterization and explanation of Asia's performance during the past three decades and by considering the relevance of its recommendations for Asia's development during the next three decades. It devotes much greater space to a discussion of disagreements - issues that Emerging Asia either neglects or treats differently from the way the author of this paper would have liked - than of the issues on which the author of this paper finds himself in agreement with Emerging Asia. This should not hide the broad agreement that the author of this paper has with the authors of Emerging Asia on much of the ground covered by the latter