EAST ASIA: THE END OF AN ERA

  • by Walden Bello
  • Inter Press Service

For East Asia, the current economic crisis represents the end of an era of export-oriented industrialisation that began in the 1960s, when Korea and Taiwan embarked on a development process that tied their growth to the US market. Encouraged by the World Bank to make ''special efforts'' to turn their manufacturing enterprises away from the relatively small markets associated with import substitution toward the much larger opportunities flowing from export promotion, the Southeast Asian countries followed suit in the 1970s and 1980s, writes Walden Bello, professor of sociology at the University of the Philippines, president of the Freedom from Debt Coalition, senior analyst at the Bangkok-based research and advocacy institute Focus on the Global South.

In this article, Bello writes that the US was everybody's export market over the last 15 years, where a consumer binge fuelled by massive international credit -much of it from China and Japan- appeared to portend a never-ending demand for Asian imports. It will not be easy to reorient the export machines that the Asian economies have become into economic engines serving the domestic market. Income and asset redistribution will be central to that reorientation, and many national elites will fight it.

Regional integration or the joining of national markets by bringing down tariffs against one another while keeping them up against non-member countries is another remedy for the decline of the US market. The different economic elites, however, are very jealous of their national markets, and government technocrats, who have been the ones promoting the dream of a 1.9 billion East Asian market, have not demonstrated an eagerness to take them on.

(*) Walden Bello is professor of sociology at the University of the Philippines, president of the Freedom from Debt Coalition, senior analyst at the Bangkok-based research and advocacy institute Focus on the Global South.

//NOT FOR PUBLICATION IN CANADA, NEW ZEALAND, CZECH REPUBLIC, IRELAND, POLAND, THE UNITED STATES, AND THE UNITED KINGDOM//

© Inter Press Service (2009) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service