The World Bank's The East Asian Miracle: Economic Growth and Public Policy makes official what East Asian specialists had long known: most of the high-performing Asian economies have had extensive government intervention, and some of these interventions, in the areas of credit and exports, have...

After the large exchange rate depreciations following the 1997 East Asian crisis, export volumes from East Asian countries responded with a notable lag. Two main explanations for this lag have been proposed: that contraction in domestic credit affected supply of exports; and that ‘competitive...

The paper argues that East Asian regionalism is fragile since (i) each nation's industrial competitiveness depends on the smooth functioning of 'Factory Asia' - in particular on intra-regional trade; (ii) the unilateral tariff-cutting that created 'Factory Asia' is not subject to WTO discipline...

East Asia has rapidly become the third centre of gravity for global economic activity. North America is relatively well integrated with East Asia, but Europe is not. This paper explores the extent to which economic growth and trade policy developments over the next decade or so will strengthen...

The controversy over the appropriate partitioning of East Asian growth into accumulation versus technical change has overlooked a fundamental indeterminacy in measurement. As a result, we cannot rule out the possibility that East Asia has in fact experienced a tremendous amount of technological...

The export booms in South Korea and Taiwan starting in the early 1960s are anomalous when compared with later export booms in other, non-East Asian countries such as Chile and Turkey. First, these booms have taken place in the context of comparatively small changes in relative prices in favour...

This paper explores to what extent the magnitude and speed of the contagion effects that materialized in East Asia in the second half of 1997 may have had "real" underpinnings, in the sense that the pattern of production, consumption and trade increased the vulnerability of East Asian countries...

In this paper we show that the delegation of monetary policy to an independent and more conservative central banker is an optimal policy in an international context with monetary spillovers between countries, even in the absence of time inconsistency (credibility) issues. We also study the...

We analyze the joint dynamics of religious beliefs, scientific progress and coalitional politics along both religious and economic lines. History offers many examples of the recurring tensions between science and organized religion, but as part of the paper’s motivating evidence we also...

To what extent has Sub-Saharan Africa’s slow economic growth over the past five decades been due to price and trade policies that have discouraged production of agricultural relative to non-agricultural tradables? This paper uses a new set of estimates of policy distortions to relative prices...