Contending Perspectives on the Economic Development of East Asia: How Does Singapore Fit In?

Over the last two decades or so, a whole string of superlatives have been used by the economics orthodoxy to describe the performance of the East Asian newly-industrialised countries (NICs). Most of the accolades have centred upon that all encompassing measure of economic welfare, the annual rate of growth in the level of GDP per capita, and the market-oriented economic policies that have been implemented to secure these quite startling outcomes. However, not everyone in the social science community has been equally bedazzled by the East Asian success story. Indeed, there are a number of commentators – mainly political scientists and sociologists, and not too many economists – who have been quite sceptical of the developmental process favoured by these nations. As a consequence, there now exists a multiplicity of interpretations and explanations for the rapid development of the East Asian economies – a factor which provides the major focus of this paper.