The East Asian Phenomenon: The Consensus, the Dissent, and the Significance of the Present Crisis

Abstract

This article offers an interpretation of East Asia's on-going financial and economic crisis, and of its developmental achievements in the previous decades known as the ‘East Asian miracle’. The interpretation centres on the notion of a regime of accumulation that covers the region as a whole. It submits that the competitive advantages and disadvantages of the regime rest on the interaction between the region's economic institutions and world capitalist development. This interaction has been, in turn, mediated by a range of history-specific developments in East Asian economies and societies.

The Limits to Globalization Theory: A Geographic Perspective on Global Economic Change

“…Glassman (2001), for example, identified the crisis more generally as an economic crisis that involves all circuits of the economy, linking domestic and international capitalist accumulation processes, and stemming, in part, from contradictions and struggles over the appropriation of the surplus and valorization of (financial) capital. In short, it reflects a serious breakdown in the capitalist regime of accumulation (Lo 1999;Hart-Landsberg and Burkett 2001;Sum 2001). It is seen as an outcome of a much deeper capitalist logic and contradictions in accumulation strategies.…”

Theorising the Korean State beyond Institutionalism: Class Content and Form of ‘National’ Development

“…For a critique of the post-Washington consensus, see Fine (2001Fine ( , 2006aFine ( , 2006b. For the changing proposition of the World Bank on the Asian Economy, see Lo (1999Lo ( , 2001. 2.…”

China's Business Reforms

“…The first claim in particular has been disputed by non-orthodox scholars on empirical and conceptual grounds. There is an emerging literature which argues that large-scale SOEs have been crucial to explaining China's growth (Nolan 1996(Nolan , 2001Nolan andYeung 2001a, 2001b;Nolan and Wang 1999;Nolan and Zhang 2002;Lo 1997Lo , 1999bSmyth 1997Smyth , 2000b. Nolan (1996) argues that there has been rapid growth in upstream industries and that through supplying producer goods and establishing substantial linkages this has fuelled growth in downstream industries, which are usually depicted in market-oriented accounts of China's growth record as the engines of growth.…”

“…Nolan (1996) argues that there has been rapid growth in upstream industries and that through supplying producer goods and establishing substantial linkages this has fuelled growth in downstream industries, which are usually depicted in market-oriented accounts of China's growth record as the engines of growth. Lo (1999a) shows that the share of industrial output of large and medium enterprises, most of which are SOEs, has increased over the reform period and that the financial performance of large and medium size enterprises has been as good as, or better than, smallscale industries. Holz (2002) goes further and questions the second and third orthodox claims.…”