Developmental Success Stories : The Rise of the NICs
Let us state the obvious: the trait that is most characteristic of developing nations is that they are poor. Poverty, malnutrition, disease, the bloated bellies of the children, illiteracy, low life expectancy, low standards of living, helplessness all these and other traits seem to go together to form a composite picture of underdevelopment. A variety of measures is used: some define underdevelopment as having a per-capita income of under $500 per year, while others use the World Bank's now measure of poverty of $1 per day per person, or $365 per year. Whatever index is used, we all know poverty when we see it and would like to do something to alleviate it. But how to do so, what is the best formula, how to raise oneself and one's country out of poverty those are the questions.
There are actually only a very few Third World countries in the world that have succeeded in raising themselves out of poverty. Quite a number of others have made progress but not spectacularly so, we need to face the hard reality that development is a long, difficult, slogging process, and there is no magic formula that will quickly blaze the way to progress. Most developing countries, sad. to say, show little progress in lifting themselves up from poverty; viewed from a global perspective, the gap between the wealthier and the poorer nations continues to widen rather than narrow. Nevertheless, there is a lot that a developing country can do to improve its prospects and raise itself up. In this chapter, we analyze the success stories, what the Newly Industrialized Countries, or NICs, have done to improve their chances, what formula they followed, and
what package (since development has to be a multipronged effort) of policies and circumstances furthered their development. And, obviously, we will want to know if their successes are replicable in other countries.
Most of the NICs or success stories are located in Asia, although there are some from other areas as well. Japan was the first non-Western nation to achieve the status of being a developed, industrialized nation, Japan, even with its current today that to be economic problems, is so dynamic and prosperous that it is hard to believe it was once a poor, underdeveloped country. Japan's development goes back over a hundred years, however; it was already industrialized before World War II, it was devastated by the war and then re-covered (like similarly defeated Germany) in the postwar period to achieve its status as the world's second most powerful economy (after the United States) with one of the world's highest standards of living. Following the Japanese model of growth in the postwar period were South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. These are the nations that are usually thought of as the world's most successful developers.
Brazil, Mexico, and Chile have been among the most successful developers in the Latin American area, and several of the Arab states Saudi Arabia Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, and Brunei are fairly advanced on the list of countries with high per-capita income. But these last countries almost literally float on oil, which is the main factor accounting for their developmental success; however, social and political modernization in these countries is still retarded. Of course, it helps if a developing country has vast resources ready for extraction, but at the same time, if we are looking to fashion a model or road map to development, it seems a bit unfair and not very useful to attribute development to sheer "dumb luck,' the mere "accident" as a country of having been born atop such rich natural resources that, no matter the country's social, economic, or political system, it is bound to make it anyway purely on the basis of vast mineral or oil wealth. It is worth noting that the countries mentioned in Latin America- Brazil, Chile, Mexico as the most successful developers are also rich in natural resources, but that is not the only reason for their success. We must, therefore, explore the other factors involved
THE TIGER AND THE FOUR LITTLE TIGERS: SEARCHING FOR THE REASON S FOR ASIA S SUCCESS STORIES
The world's most impressive developmental success stories may be found in Asia: Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. Probably it is no accident that the most successful of the developing nations are all found in Asia, and we will want to explore later on the reasons for that. Japan was devastated in World War only two or three decades later it developed a global powerhouse second with a population only to the United States in economic production capita income that made one-third that of the United States of the richest nations in it, even in the absence of many natural resources, one or the wealthiest the world, on a par with or ahead of the United States European countries.
In some ways the accomplishments of South Korea and Taiwan are even more impr