The Asia

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The Asia-Pacific Region:

Present Realities and Alternative Futures

by Walden Bello

Dr. Walden Bello is Co-Director of Focus on the South, a research NGO affiliated with

the Chulalongkorn University Social Research University in Bangkok, and Professor of

Sociology and Public Administration at the University of the Philippines. This present

paper was presented by Dr. Bello at the 26th CCA-URM Programme Committee

Meeting, Bangkok Thailand, Feb. 12-18, 1995.

The Asia-Pacific has been the site of explosive economic growth over the last 20 years. This phenomenon has been accompanied by an intense debate on what triggered this growth, whether it is an appropriate model for breaking out of underdevelopment and whether it is sustainable.

Three competing paradigms have emerged in the course of this debate. While the dominant conflict at this point is between the free market approach and the “NIC” or “newly industrializing country” model of state-assisted capitalism, coming up as a serious challenger to both is what we might provisionally call the paradigm of “sustainable development”.

The Free Market Explanation

The Free Market Model of East Asian development is espoused by orthodox economists such as those connected with the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and the so-called “Eminent Persons Group” of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC). In their view, the market was the central mechanism of rapid growth in Japan and the NICs in the past, and freeing market forces even more fully from government controls is the key to continued high-speed growth.

;Currently, the Free Market/Free Trade approach has been institutionalized in World Bank and lMF-imposed structural adjustment programs (SAPs), which promote radical deregulation, sweeping privatization, trade and investment liberalization, export-oriented trade and investment strategies, containment of wages and cutting back government expenditures. Purportedly inspired by the East Asia experience, SAPs have been generalized over the last decade to Sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa, Latin America and South Asia.

The problem with this model say its critics, is that hardly any of the fast-growing countries of the region achieved “NIChood” by following the free market formula except possibly Hong Kong and Singapore which are dependent urban economies masquerading as national economies. The Southeast Asia stars of the last five years – Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia – are often portrayed in the business press as examples of growth through the implementation of liberal economic policies. Nothing could be further from the truth.

· Malaysia, which has been experiencing a growth rate of 10 per cent per annum in the last few years, is one of the few Third World countries that escaped stabilization or structural adjustment by the World Bank and IMF in the 1980s. In fact, the Malaysian state intervened heavily in economic life to give Malays more control of the national economy, maintained a protectionist trade regime, and engaged in what is called “picking winners,” or targeting certain industries to develop through direct government aid, subsidized credit and other incentives. It was not unfettered market forces that produced the wildly successful Proton-Saga, also known as national car. It was a partnership between a state enterprise and Mitsubishi that produced the car as part of a state-managed rationalization of the car industry.[1]

· Indonesia’s growth rate of five to six per cent in recent years is often attributed to free market policies by World Bank officials. But the reality is that economic liberalization has been quite limited with the economy continuing to be marked by a high degree of protectionism, control by monopolies and strong restrictions on foreign investment. And if the Malaysian state has targeted the car industry, the Indonesian government has heavily subsidized the creation of an increasingly sophisticated aircraft industry which was as in the Malaysian case, roundly criticized by World Bank and neoclassical economists.[2]

· Of all the large economies of Southeast Asia, Thailand is perhaps the closest to a market-dominated economy. Yet one finds the seeming anomaly that the Thai economy actually became more protectionist as it moved to a second state of import substitution in the mid and late 1980s, precisely the period when it began to register the eight to eleven per cent growth rates that dazzled the world.[3]

State-Assisted Capitalism

Dissatisfaction with both the explanatory power and prescriptive thrust of the free-market school has pawned a school of thought that goes in the exact opposite direction, to claim that state intervention in the NICs has been the central factor in the take-off of these economies. Specifically, development was produced by a strategy consisting of:

· strategic economic planning managed by government, exemplified in some countries by 5 to 10 year plans;

· government targeting of industries to develop and generous subsidization of private enterprises specializing in these industries or the establishment of state enterprises to develop the targeted industries;

· building strategic economic depth by moving in a planned fashion from the development of consumer goods industries to intermediate goods and capital goods enterprises;

· reserving the domestic market for local entrepreneurs by maintaining tight restrictions on imports and on foreign investments;

· adopting a mercantilist trade strategy consisting of limiting the entry of foreign imports to the domestic market while aggressively winning and dominating export markets, resulting in a growing trade surplus; and

· bold manipulation of “Keynesian” macroeconomic mechanisms like deficit spending, loose credit policies and borrowing from foreign creditors to force the pace of the development process.

To borrow economist Alice Amsden’s classic phrase, this view holds that the Asian NICs developed “not because they got relative prices right but because they got them deliberately wrong.”[4] True, market mechanisms operated, but they were deliberately distorted and much inefficiency was tolerated in the short-term to build up strategic economic depth. For instance, Korean technocrats deliberately violated the classical free market principle of consumer sovereignty – “Give the consumer the best product at the lowest price” – for the larger strategic goal of strengthening national economic sovereignty. Thus, if the price of Korean-made computers in the domestic market was three to four times that in export markets, this was in order to allow local conglomerates and monopolies to recoup the losses they incurred in battling the formidable Japanese in highly competitive export markets.

To take another example, in contrast to the neoclassical dictum that macroeconomic stability is a key condition of growth, proponents of state-assisted capitalism see imbalance as a necessary feature of development. And they point to the fact that the heavy and chemical industry drive in Korea in the 1970’s may have provoked a lot of short-term dislocations and triggered inflation, but it also laid the basis for Korea’s successful push to export capital-intensive, high-tech products like microchips and cars in the 1980’s.[5]

Theoretical Models And Economic Realpolitik

Exasperated by what it saw as the World Bank and lMF’s doctrinal commitment to the free market/free trade paradigm, Japan’s famous Ministry of Trade and Industry (MTI), a few years ago, issued a cautious critique of World Bank-IMF structural adjustment programs, the message of which was that dismantling of an activist economic role for the state through indiscriminate liberalization, deregulation and privatization was what was prolonging economic stagnation inadjusted countries.[6]

More important, the Japanese prodded the World Bank to review the Asian region’s development experience and came forward with the bulk of the funding for the study. Released in late 1993, the World Bank study entitled The East Asian Economic Miracle, grudgingly agreed that Japan, Korea and some other NICs had not unsuccessfully employed state-activist policies such as “picking winners”, compensating market failure through subsidized loans to the private sector and strategic protectionism. But much to the consternation of the Japanese, the World Bank asserted that these policies, while possibly successful in the earlier NICs, were not applicable to other developing countries in East Asia and elsewhere, and that they were constructive for certain

countries only during a specific historical period, which had passed.[7]

The study’s guiding lesson for countries still seeking to break out of underdevelopment was: “it is still better not to intervene than to intervene.” Interestingly, this advice against replicating the NICs’ experience with industrial policy drew the following response from one prominent critic of the free-market school:

· There is reason to worry whether the World Bank’s refusal to countenance selective industrial policies for industries with high entry barriers reflects an underlying unwillingness to help developing countries enter industries that are already well-established in the West, especially when Western plants have excess capacity... Given the governance structure of the World Bank, it is not difficult to imagine why...[8]

Some may dismiss this as crude conspiracy theory, but the Bank study’s readiness to attribute success to market policies while raising the standard of proof when it comes to assessing interventionist industrial policies does reflect the fact that more than just academic and technocratic issues are at stake in the NIC debate.

Indeed, the conflicting theoretical positions have become weapons for clashing national economic interests. If Japanese and NIC technocrats have been seeking to articulate a distinctive NIC model of state-assisted capitalism, it is not only to understand their own development experience or, in the case of Japan, to guide development aid policies, but also in order to protect and legitimize the position they have attained in the world economy.

The defensive adoption of this paradigm as an ideology is a response to the way the United States has, ever since the mid-eighties, brazenly used free-trade and free-market ideology to open up Japan and the NIC economies to US exports and US investments in order to reassert US corporate hegemony in a part of the world that has been fast spinning out of the US economic orbit.

The debate over models, in short, is one front of the ongoing trade war, and no statement captures most graphically the link between development strategies and national economic interests than the declaration of trade war made by a senior US Treasury official a few years ago: “Although the NICs may be regarded as tigers because they are strong, ferocious traders, the analogy has a darker side. Tigers live in the jungle, and by the law of the jungle. They are a shrinking population.”[9]

Most of the press coverage of the US trade conflict with Asia has focused on Japan. But the US has treated Japan relatively gently compared to the way it has treated some of the other Asian countries, particularly Korea, probably because the latter have less capability to retaliate. In bilateral trade negotiations with Korea and other NICs, the United States, brandishing the ideology of free trade and free markets with the threat of unilateral trade sanctions, has aggressively demanded the dismantling of foreign investment restrictions, protectionist mechanisms, and other practices of state-assisted capitalism. And the bigger and more successful the economy, the more aggressive the US free market assault. In the case of Korea, for instance, the US economic offensive has ballooned into a broad assault that encompasses investment practices, intellectual property issues, the agricultural market, telecommunications, financial services, and even health regulations and cultural preferences. Thus the Korean government’s campaigns encouraging Koreans to buy domestically produced goods as opposed to imports were denounced by US trade officials as erecting a “trade barrier”, even as they saw as totally legitimate American corporations’ use of the slogan “Buy American” in the US market. The US Commerce Department has also targeted Korean inspection regulations as creating what they call “numerous barriers that prohibit access or inhibit port clearance procedures without a sound scientific basis.”[10] In fact, US trade officials have even criticized the Koreans’ propensity to save instead of consume (presumably imports), saying that this is really an outmoded way of relating to the world.

APEC As A Battleground

The Asian political and economic elite’s suspicion of the free market/free trade model and their increasing identification with state-assisted capitalism was recently heightened when the US pushed to have the Asia-Pacific Cooperation (APEC) transformed from a consultative forum to a trading bloc with a timetable for the disappearance of trade and investment barriers. This effort, promoted heavily at the so-called “APEC Summits” in Seattle in November 1993 and, most recently, in Bogor, has been seen almost universally by Asian governments as an “end run”, to borrow a term from American football – as a U.S. effort to outmaneuver them by institutionalizing, via a multilateral organization, the free trade agenda that it had been trying to force the Asians to swallow in bilateral trade negotiations.

A key element in the American game plan was the creation of an APEC “Eminent Persons’ Group” (EPG), to provide the intellectual muscle for the free trade agenda. Made up largely of pro-free trade economists, technocrats and policy-makers from the APEC member countries, this quasi-official body was largely set up, with the blessings of the U.S. trade bureaucracy, by Dr. Fred Bergsten, head of the Washington-based Institute of International Economics, to push the U.S. free trade agenda. A stalwart of Washington’s economic establishment, Bergsten is widely known as an unabashed promoter of U.S. economic interests via free trade, and he has served as a key lobbyist not only for APEC but for the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the north American Free Trade Area (NAFTA).

With aggressive self-promotion, Bergsten and the EPG have managed to project themselves as a quasi-official body pushing a multilateral consensus rather than a body dominated by free traders espousing the U.S. trade agenda. The blueprint they came out with, a strategy of “open regionalism” that would have all trade barriers down in the region by the year 2020, was in fact, adopted at the recent Bogor Summit. But the surface unanimity on the document, in fact, masked the deep rifts among the participants. The United States, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Mexico and Chile are earnest believers in the 2020 plan. But these countries are seen by Asian technocrats as the outsiders seeking to gatecrash the party known as the “East Asian Economic Miracle”. For most of the so-called “core” Asian members of APEC, agreeing to a statement that was long on vision but vague on implementation was less a declaration of belief than a relatively costless maneuver to accommodate American economic power.

The opposition to the APEC free trade vision has been openly spearheaded by Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, who boycotted the Seattle Summit. But just as effective in sabotaging or, at least slowing down, the free trade plan has been the Japanese’ silent refusal to go along with the U.S. design. This was not surprising since the Japanese would be the big losers with the establishment of a free trade area deprived of mechanisms limiting the access of U.S. goods and U.S. capital. For the Japanese have practically integrated the region around the Japanese economy since the mid-1980’s when the appreciation of the yen forced them to transfer a substantial part of their manufacturing operations to cheap labor sites in East Asia and Southeast Asia. Between 1985 and 1990, for instance, some $40 billion worth of Japanese investment swirled through the region, as Japanese conglomerates and their suppliers spread their facilities throughout the area according to locational advantage, in the process creating a massive export platform consisting of complementary conglomerate operations situated in different countries.

Massive Japanese investment has, in fact, been the principal factor stimulating East Asian, particularly Southeast Asia prosperity in the last decade, not liberalization of trade and internal economy. If Asia prospered, while Latin America and Africa stagnated, this was largely because the latter were subjected to a cut-off of external capital cum structural adjustment as a result of the Third World debt crisis while the former was treated to a massive overdose of external, Japanese, capital. The $2.2 billion worth of Japanese investment that flowed into Malaysia between 1985 and 1990 served as the engine for the country’s 10 per cent per annum growth rate, while Indonesia’s 5-6 per cent growth was directly correlated with the infusion of close to $4 billion in Japanese investment during the same period. But perhaps the relationship between growth and the massive injection of Japanese capital is most obvious in the case of Thailand, which has served as the strategic center of Japanese operations in Southeast Asia. As one report notes:[12]

The current explanation of Thailand’s accelerated growth rate was the 1985 appreciation of the value of the yen, rendering Japanese production more costly. Japanese multinational companies were forced to look for new lower cost production locations. In 1987, Japanese investment approvals by Thailand’s Board of Investments exceeded the cumulative Japanese investment for the preceding 20 years.

But unlike the American design of integration via free trade, the Japanese design of integration via investment has not demanded that the Asian governments change their investment laws. It has not required that they reduce their tariffs. It has not stipulated that they end their subsidies for local firms. And it has not demanded unrestricted entry for Japanese goods into the domestic market. It is all very informal, “very Asian”, say envious U.S. trade officials. As one Washington-based government analyst puts it, “The Japanese don’t need free trade to create a trading and investment bloc.”[13]

In any event, the battle over the direction of APEC has reinforced a sense among many of the Asian elite that they have a more strategic partnership with Japan than with the United States, though the U.S. continues to be the main export market for many of them. It has also reinforced a common identification with a system of state-assisted capitalism which many are now calling the “East Asian system”. Viewing APEC as an American Trojan Horse, they were willing to lend lip service to the Bogor vision of Asia-Pacific wide free trade but they are likely to work with their Japanese hosts during the upcoming Osaka Summit in 1995 to stymie its achievement in practice.

The Sustainable Development Critique

While the elite have battled to define the direction of Asia-Pacific development along free-market or state-assisted capitalist lines, many NGOs, people’s movements and progressive academics have, over the last few years, evolved a powerful critique of both elite models and the beginnings of an alternative approach.

What is often referred to as the “sustaina-ble development approach” is not an import from the North, but one that has largely emerged from myriads of grassroots confrontations with the alienating impact of unchecked market forces and the repressive impact of state-sponsored “development from above”. While drawing partly from the Marxist critique and partly from Western environmentalist thinking, the sustainable development perspective in the Asia-Pacific has been largely an indigenous effort to reflect and address the contradictions of four decades of western-style development.[14] It is now stepping into the vacuum created by the collapse of traditional socialist ideology, increasingly serving as the vehicle for the articulation of the aspirations of the dispossessed and the oppressed.

The sustainable development critique holds that, despite some very real differences, the free market and NIC models have more to unite them than divide them:

· Both the free-market and NIC models fetishize economic growth as the be-all and the end-all of development.

· Both intrinsically generate and perpetuate social inequality even as, in the case of the NIC model, rapid growth takes place. Indeed, high growth rates are necessary to allow a rise in absolute income without having to undertake redistribution of wealth. This conjunction of a rise in absolute income and worsening income distribution has characterized Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Thailand in the last 20 years.

· Both models – again intrinsically – are ecologically destructive and unsustainable. In the case of the market approach, there is a rundown of natural capital since ecological costs are typically not factored into the real costs of production. And in the case of NIC capitalism, there is a deliberate sacrifice of the environment to attract local and foreign capital in order to deliver high-speed growth. Indeed, the prospect of zero investment in pollution control is one of the two cornerstones of the NIC model, the other being cheap labor. In the NICs, market and state, in fact, act in a complementary fashion to create an accelerated plunder of the environment. In Taiwan, the policy of decentralized decentralization decreed by the KMT government pushed small and medium industries to settle helter-skelter throughout the country, beside residences and the nearest waterways, in the process decentralizing pollution and converting the island into an ecological wasteland. In Thailand, market, private interests and state policy has created the convergence of two ecological catastrophes: massive deforestation and massive water pollution.

· Both approaches have very destructive effects on communities: in the case of the market approach, because of the dissolving effect of unchecked market forces on communal and community bonds; in the case of state-assisted capitalism, through the deliberate breaking up and resettling of organic communities that stand in the way of state-managed development projects. In Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia, the story is depressingly similar: big dam schemes imposed from the center, uprooting and resettlement of communities, particularly indigenous people and the gradual erosion and silent destruction of resettled communities.

· Both the free-market and the NIC model are elite agenda, though in the second case, the state elite has, in some cases, managed to discipline an otherwise short-term oriented private sector along a strategic “national development” path.

East Asian NGOs have often been criticized as being long on critique but short on prescription. This has, however, changed in the last few years. Though expressed in different ways, the expressions of alternative development emerging in Thailand, the Philippines, Korea and Taiwan exhibit a core of key ideas.

· In opposition to the blind play of market forces in the free-market approach and to state flat in the NIC model, the sustainable development perspective would make transparent, rational and democratic decision-making the fundamental mechanism of production, exchange and distribution.

· In contrast to the impersonal control by the “invisible hand” in the free-market model and to the hierarchical and centralizing thrust of decision-making in the NIC model, the sustainable development model would decentralize economic decision making and management to communities, regions or ecological zones and make national planning a bottom-up process.

· In opposition to the premium placed on economic growth by the free-market and NIC models, the sustainable development model de-emphasizes growth in favor of equity, the quality of life, and ecological harmony.

· Whereas both the free-market and NIC models are heavily biased toward urban-based industry, sustainable development would make agriculture and the reinvigoration of rural society the centerpiece of development process.

· While in both the free-market and NIC models, the pursuit of profitability dictates the adoption of capital-intensive high technology in industry and chemical-intensive technology in agriculture, the sustainable development approach would try to reverse what it considers uncontrolled technological change at the expense of people and the environment, favoring the development of labor-intensive appropriate technology for industry and organize, chemical-free agrotechnology.

· Whereas, in the free-market model, the private sector calls the shots and in the NIC model the estate-big business partnership has a “duopoly” over political and economic decision-making, the sustainable development approach would organize the popular sector, represented by NGOs, as the third pillar of the political and economic system – as a balance to state and business in the short term but with the strategic perspective of making it the dominant force in the triad in the long term.

· Finally, in contrast to a property system based on the division between private and public ownership in both the free-market and NIC models, the sustainable development approach supports the recognition, institutionalization and expansion of the realm of the “commons”, or community or ancestral property that cannot be disposed of either by the market or by the state.

Success Stories Of Sustainable Development

Experiments in sustainable development are now taking place all over the region, ranging from community forestry projects in Thailand to community-run “integrated area development” in the Philippines. There are success stories:

· Mangrove forests are a vital component of complex coastal ecosystems in the tropics. Yet they have been ravaged with breathtaking speed by logging concessions, destructive fishing practices and especially prawn and shrimp farming. In Thailand, villagers in Si Kao and Kan Tang districts in the southern province of Trang have successfully created a 25-hectare community mangrove forest from which destructive fishing methods have been effectively banned. The experiment has achieved a relatively harmonious relationship between livelihood and forest life, and in the three years since the destructive fishing was stopped, marine like and other indicators of coastal ecology have improved dramatically. The Trang project has, in fact, become a model not only of sustainable livelihood but also of working relationships among local people, NGOs, concerned government officials and committed academics.

· In the Philippines, the island of Cebu exhibits many of the disheartening problems plaguing the country’s agrarian economy: erosion due to massive deforestation, deteriorating living conditions of peasant smallholders, almost total absence of government programs to support peasant productivity, and the conversion of agricultural land into commercial real estate in order to avoid land reform. But an exciting 14-year-old experiment in farmer self-reliance, BAPAKA, has enjoyed some success in countering the displacement and dispossession triggered by unrestrained market forces and uncontrolled industrialization on the island of Cebu. Now covering 27 villages in four districts and encompassing some 2880 members, BAPAKA has evolved a multi-pronged assault on peasant poverty consisting of a food security program resting on small production teams mobilized to maximize yields from individual farms, a loans and savings fund to provide for members’ emergency and production needs, a program to process livestock and poultry into consumer food items, a marketing program and even a research and development program to propagate indigenous and organic farming methods. The result, according to Farmer News and Views, is “the organization’s members are now assured of food in their tables, can send their kids to school and meet some of the basic needs of a more decent life.” Equally important is the diffusion of a sense of “individual empowerment”.[17]

So far, however, clear successes in alternative, sustainable development are but a handful and one of the reasons is that enterprises are often confined to the community level where they subsist as enclaves assaulted by the alienating dynamics of broader free-market forces and topdown NIC development. To make sustainable development a national project, an alliance of NGOs in the Philippines has successfully pressed the government to create the Philippine Council for Sustainable Development (PCSD) by appealing to 1992 Rio de Janeiro Summit’s Agenda 21, to which the government subscribed, as well as to the rhetorical commitment of the Fidel Ramos administration to promote sustainable development. While the thrust of government economic policy is to make the Philippines “an NIC by the year 2000”, the PCSD arena has been instrumental in allowing NGOs to question this vision and present the strategy of sustainable development as a credible alternative in the public view. A recent major accomplishment of the body was the joint NGO-government hosting in late July 1994 of an international conference on “Operationalizing Sustainable Development”.

Sustainable Development As A Regional Alternative

If sustainable development is only now being raised as a credible national development alternative, its profile as a regional alternative is embryonic. And to be a player in an increasingly economically integrated region, an alternative must address regional issues. The American have APEC. The Japanese, Chinese and more and more Southeast Asian elite appear to be gravitating towards Mahathir’s idea of an “East Asia Economic Group” which would leave state-assisted capitalist structures in place while excluding from membership the US, Australia and Canada.

But already NGOs in the region have taken the first step in making sustainable development a viable regional mode. Two conferences, the People’s Forum held in Bangkok in 1991 and the People’s Plan 21 also held in Bangkok in 1992, say NGOs and people’s organizations from all over Asia come together not only to express solidarity and to share experiences but also to begin articulating a different strategy for an Asia-Pacific future.

Allow me to point out some of the ideas that are emerging in such consultations:[18]

Rather than beginning from bringing down barriers to inter-corporate or intra-corporate trade, an alternative strategy for regional integration could begin by addressing the pressing crossborder problems that undercut the welfare of people and the environment. One such problem is posed by multinational corporations that pit one country against another by threatening to move their operations to those with the lowest labor costs and the most tax environmental enforcement. The creation of a common regional environmental code with tight standards and a common labor code with guarantees of unionism and decent wage standards would be an important step in bringing about this people-based regional integration.

As another step in this people-based integration, a common front could be created to demand technology transfer from both Japanese and Western firms, a demand that can now be easily ignored if it comes from individual governments and individual companies. But beyond strengthening their hand in technology transfer, a people-based Asia-Pacific technoeconomic bloc would pool together the region’s capital and personnel resources for directed programs at research and development, not only in high tech but also in appropriate technology for industry and agriculture. This would be especially important in the area of agricultural technology since farmers throughout the area are now in desperate need for more appropriate alternatives to chemical-intensive, Green Revolution technology which – as even the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) now concedes – has had very significant negative long-term effects on both the soil and on the environment which may surface in food shortages and famines in the near future.

In the area of trade itself, a people-based regional integration would move toward connecting trading communities or regions directly, creating community trading organizations that would supplant the corporate middlemen that now siphon off most of the profits at both ends of the trading link, at the supplier end and the consumer end. Trade itself would have to be taken away from its present dynamics of locking in communities and countries into a division of labour that diminishes their capabilities in the name of “comparative advantage” and “interdependence” and transformed into a process that enhances the capabilities of communities that ensures that initial cleavages that develop owing to necessary division of labor do not congeal into permanent cleavages and that has mechanisms including income and technology sharing arrangements that prevent exploitative relationships from developing between trading communities.

This vision of an alternative regional future is very different from the American corporate vision of regional integration via investment, and the economists’ and technocrats’ vision of never-ending, high-speed growth. Articulating this alternative future is, more than ever, a necessity for while the rampant consumerism that comes with high-speed growth continues to dazzle many, there is a growing feeling that super-industrial growth accompanied by the decline of agriculture, increasing inequality and uncontrolled ecological degradation is a recipe for an unlivable future. Emigration rates, one might note as an afterthought, might be a manifestation of deep-seated apprehensions. The numbers of people leaving Korea, Taiwan and Singapore for the West have not declined with development, perhaps reflecting a national sense that NIC development is really a strip-mine type of development that destroys the future for the sake of the present.

NOTES

1. See Ricard Doner, Domestic Coalitions and Japanese Auto Firms in Southeast Asia, Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1987, pp.511-596.

2. For more details, see “Hero Flying on Indonesia’s First Passenger Plane,” The Australian, Nov.10, 1994, p.15.

3. Charles Sakasakul, Lessons from the World Bank’s Experience of Structural Adjustment Loans: A Case Study of Thailand (Bangkok: Thailand Development Research Institute, 1992), p.19.

4. For good expositions of this perspective, see Alice Amsden, Asia’s New Giant (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991) and Robert Wade, Governing the Market (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).

5. See the treatment of this in Walden Bello and Stephanie Resenfeld, Dragons in Distress: Asia’s Miracle Economies in Crisis (London: Penguin, 1991), pp.44-57.

6. MITI Memorandum (full reference to be provided).

7. World Bank, The East Asian Miracle (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

8. Robert Wade, “Selective Industrial Policies in East Asia: Is the East Asian Miracle Right,” in Albert Fishlow et al., Miracle or Design: Lessons from the East Asian Experience (Washington, D.C.: Overseas Development Council, 1994), pp.74-75.

9. David Mulford, “Remarks before the Asia-Pacific Capital Markets Conference,” San Francisco, Nov.17, 1987.

10. U.S.Dept. of Commerce, “Korea Background — Key Issues,” Washington, D.C., Nov. 1992.

11. For more on this, see Walden Bello, People and Power in the Pacific (London: Pluto Press, 1992), pp. 83-101.

12. Thailand Development Research Institute (TDRI), Thailand’s Economic Structure: Summary Report (Bangkok: TDRl, 1992), pp. 2, 26.

13. Dick Nanto, Pacific Rim Economic Cooperation (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Research Service, April 3, 1989), p. 10.

14. See Seri Phongpit et al. and Green Forum White Paper (full reference forthcoming).

15. For these figures, see Dragons in Distress, pp. 36, 215, 309. See also Suthy Prasartset, etc. (full reference forthcoming).

16. The contradictions of Thailand’s development will be more fully explored in the author’s forthcoming book tentatively entitled, “The Siamese Paradox”.

17. Farmer News and Views (Philippines) (full reference forthcoming).

18. These views are elaborated in People and Power in the Pacific, pp.115-125.

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