How can the Japanese anomaly be explained? A review essay of Atul Kohli's Imperialism and the Developing World - Atul Kohli, Imperialism and the Developing World: How Britain and the United States Shaped the Global Periphery, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.

The impact of imperialism on long-term development in the non-Western world was once a popular agenda of inquiry. After the modernization paradigm turned into despair for postcolonial economies, the notions of informal empire (Gallagher and Robinson, 1953) and dependency (Prebisch, 1950; Frank, 1967; Cardoso and Faletto, 1979) marked economists' discussions on underdevelopment in the non-Western world. The agenda, however, lost its momentum after the 1970s, when some Latin American and East Asian economies began growing and research interests and policy agendas shifted from blaming external constraints to identifying internal enablers (Haggard, 1990, 2018). The externalist scholarship became almost moribund thereafter, although its leitmotif was taken over by some Marxian scholarship such as the world-systems theory (Wallerstein, 1974) and its structuralist and anti-globalization offshoots – also partly reincarnated in the literature on the resource curse (Auty, 1993; Karl, 1997).

Harnessing the Demographic Dividend in Africa Through Lessons From East Asia's Experience

Notably, East Asian Economies successfully capitalized on shifts in their age structures to gain a boost in economic productivity, a phenomenon known as the demographic dividend. Nowadays, despite the hitherto sluggish pace of Africa’s transition, experts remain optimistic that similar transformation in Africa may lead to faster development in coming decades. The paper attempts to answer the following three questions: (i) Can natural resource development help African economies harness its demographic dividend? (ii) as China forty years long, demographic dividend draws to an end, China is actively trying to capture fresh economic opportunities in higher-value-added productive activity. Can Africa seize this opportunity provided by its own emerging demographic dividend era? (iii) Can imitation game help African economies harness its demographic dividend? Arguably, for African economies to imitate the East Asian miracle and harness a maximum demographic dividend, they should adhere to these three mechanisms: labor supply, savings, and human capital.

China’s Mushrooming Free Trade Agreements: New Zealand and China’s Upgraded Free Trade Agreement

FTAs have mushroomed and proliferated at very fast pace in East Asia, especially after the Asian Financial Crisis (AFC) of 1997. The East Asian economies were very disappointed with the International Monetary Fund’s handling of the crisis. In particular, it provided some countries, like Thailand and Indonesia, with poor advice. After the AFC, countries like China, Japan, and South Korea signed FTAs with different countries around the world. The first East Asian FTA talks took place between Japan and South Korea in 1998. Like its neighbors, China also pursued FTAs with neighboring countries. The FTA between China and New Zealand was signed on the 7th of April 2008 and was implemented on the 1st of October 2008. As a result of this FTA, China has become New Zealand’s largest trading partner; New Zealand’s exports to China have quadrupled. As of June 2020, the trade between China and New Zealand exceeded NZ$32 Billion. China and New Zealand signed an upgraded FTA on the 26th of January 2021. The upgraded FTA includes rules relating to e-commerce, competition policy, government procurement, and environment and trade issues. The bilateral trade between China and New Zealand is complimentary rather than competitive; while China mainly exports manufactured products to New Zealand, New Zealand primarily exports agricultural products.

Are Family Firms More Levered? An Analysis of Family and Non-Family Firms

This study analyzes the leverage policies of the family and non-family firms of eight East Asian Economies (Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, and Taiwan) by using combined data of 690 family and non-family firms with 3,224 firm–years over the period 2006–2010. This study has used an ordinary least squares (OLS) regression for analyzing the data for the first question, while for the second question, logit regression has been used as the dependent variable (a binary variable). Prior research on family and non-family firms has revealed that family firms issue less (high) debt than non-family firms. Our analysis on a sample of East Asian Economies discloses that family firms have significantly different leverage levels than non-family firms, but their signs are not consistent. On the contrary, when the owner works as CEO/Chairman or member of the Board of Directors, then the family firms issue less debt than the non-family firms. Besides that, this study adds a new question that has not been addressed in the prior studies. The new question has focused on the speed of leverage adjustment. It is found that family firms and non-family firms regarding their debt maturity structure (short-term debt and long-term debt), the speed of leverage adjustments, and their decision to issue securities (i.e., debt vs. equity) are not significantly different. This study concluded that though family firms have a strong influence on each economy, but in South-East Asian countries, leverage policies of the family firms are not much different than that of non-family firms.

Competitiveness, Manufacturing and Infrastructure: The Asian Paradigm

Emerging Asian economies are at the cusp of marking a structural shift from being factor driven to the one driven by efficiency. This is translated into their actions towards strategising their growth drivers so as to achieve factor-based efficiency through industrial infrastructure creation, namely MSME clusters, economic corridors, economic cities, infrastructure enablers and logistics hub. While the traditional tenets of competitiveness are based on building competitive advantage in manufacturing of certain products and their integration in the global value chain, this article builds upon the concept of competitiveness as a function of its constituent pillars as defined by the World Economic Forum. The objective of this article is to present a holistic view on the constituent pillars of competitiveness that have contributed maximum to the increased per capita GDP and trade for East Asian economies. Through an examination of select countries as case studies and studying their development through time, this article presents policymakers with strategies that can be used for designing manufacturing development strategy for emerging economies.

Social Capital and Innovation in East Asia

This paper investigates the relationship between social capital and innovation in high-performing East Asian economies. Rapid economic growth and innovation in these economies contradicts the presumed positive link between social trust and innovation suggested in the literature, as these economies are often characterized as low-trust societies. The results of the multilevel analyses conducted in this paper show that social trust among individuals is not a driving force of innovation in East Asia. Instead, other elements of social capital—shared social norms of supporting collective developmental goals and trust in formal institutions—are more important determinants of innovation. This finding reveals the region-specific developmental path of East Asia—states set innovation and growth as common goals for society and played an active role in initiating and coordinating efforts to achieve them.