The experience of European countries provides some invaluable lessons in the 18th
century. A tremendous stream of migrants from the rural to the city areas successively
changed a feudal mode of production to a capitalist one. Furthermore, the industrial sector
was able to absorb this surplus labour, while technological progress in the agricultural sector
gave rise to a high productivity in land and labour. As a consequence, the modern sector
could be more quickly developed when the capitalist economy expanded and modern
machines clearly required more labour. It is argued that this pattern has been taking place in
the East Asian NIEs since the 1960s (Oshima, 1978; 1993)