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Publications (27)
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Macroeconomic strategies and policies have differed significantly among Asian countries over the last fifty years, and yet some common issues recur despite their immense diversity in inherited historical initial conditions, differences in political systems, geo-political situations, location and...
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– A chapter in the Asian drama
This paper is a short history of the Indian economy since 1968. India today is a changed country from what it was half a century ago, when Myrdal published his Asian Drama. The stranglehold of low growth has been broken, its population below the poverty line has fallen markedly, and India has joined...
– Experience over the last fifty years
Asia has achieved remarkable economic growth and seen hundreds of millions of citizens rise out of poverty since the mid-1960s. Constructing and analysing the factors behind continent’s poverty and inequality over the last fifty years helps gain important insights for further reducing global poverty...
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Over the past sixty years, most Asian countries have undergone relatively rapid agricultural transformations that helped jumpstart broader economic development. However, the changes have differed markedly in nature and speed across countries of the region. In much of East and Southeast Asia, the...
The transformation of Asia’s education and health systems over the last 50 years has been breathtaking and unprecedented in human history. There are some central features of this transformation that clearly stand out. Over the last 50 years, all Asian countries have been able to expand citizen...
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This paper studies the political and economic evolution of trade and international relations of the nations and regions of Asia between themselves and the rest of the world over the past millennium, paying particular attention to: the Pax Mongolica and overland trade during the Middle Ages; the...
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Inspired by Gunnar Myrdal’s core concepts discussed in his seminal work, Asian Drama: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations, published in 1968, this paper analyses the opening-up experiences of three Asian countries (China, India, and Malaysia) by triangulating between the following: (i) the...
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Myrdal did not cover China in his Asian Drama. If he did, he would have been most likely pessimistic about China, as he was about other Asian countries in his book. However, China has achieved miraculous growth since the transition from a planned economy to a market economy at the end of 1978. This...
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How have economic development, employment, and labour markets in Asian countries interacted since the publication of Myrdal’s Asian Drama? Myrdal rejected, the western approach to and definition of employment and emphasized the role of ‘informal’ employment, but he underestimated the effects of the...
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– The East Asian ‘mystery’ solved
Few non-western countries have reached the general prosperity of Western Europe and North America in the past two centuries. The core–periphery structure of the world economy created in the early decades of the Industrial Revolution has proved robust, even after seven decades of self-conscious...
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This paper analyses the dramatic spread of education and healthcare in Asia and also the large variations in that spread across and within countries over 50 years. Apart from differences in initial conditions and income levels, the nature of the state has also been an important determinant of these...
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This paper attempts to understand Asian Drama in the context of the development debates of its time, and in terms of the sensibilities that Gunnar Myrdal—the brilliant economic theorist and philosopher of knowledge, and Swedish politician—brought to the conceptualization of the problems and...
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– Trends in industrialization and industrial policy experiences of developing Asia
Industrial transformation of Asia arguably constitutes the most surprising and dramatic change in the global economy in the last fifty years. This paper provides an outline of some of the most important trends of this development and analyses selected national industrial policies that promoted...
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– The role of norms and organizational power
The role of institutions in Asian development has been intensely contested since Myrdal’s Asian Drama, with later contributions from institutional economics and developmental state theory. Despite much progress, the dominant approaches do not agree about the institutions that matter nor do they...
When Gunnar Myrdal published his magnum opus, Asian Drama: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations, in 1968, he was deeply pessimistic about the development prospects in Asia. The fifty years since witnessed a remarkable economic transformation in Asia — even if it has been uneven across countries...
Displaying 16 of 27 results