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Publications (16)
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Gunnar Myrdal published Asian Drama in 1968, a work which made important analytical contributions to our understanding of development but was deeply pessimistic about Asia’s future prospects. Since then, contrary to Myrdal’s expectations, Asia’s development has been remarkable, although...
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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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– The dragon that rose from the ashes
This study takes as its starting point what Gunnar Myrdal had to say about Vietnam in the context of his seminal work, Asian Drama: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations, published in 1968. Myrdal pointed to the decisive nature of the Vietnamese people; and subsequent developments, which are...
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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...
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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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– Challenging the pessimism of Myrdal’s Asian Drama
This chapter addresses the unrelenting pessimism in Asian Drama about Indonesia’s development prospects. This pessimism was based on two key realities: the poor level of governance demonstrated by the Sukarno regime (partly a heritage of Dutch colonial policies) and the extreme poverty witnessed in...
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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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– 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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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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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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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...
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This paper assesses recent theorising and empirical evidence on the impact of fiscal policy—taxes, public expenditures and budget deficits—on long-run growth. It considers the relevance of recent advances in growth theory for low-income countries and compares the evidence for low-income countries...
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– Empirical Evidence from Developing Countries
The study is an empirical test of the effects of different categories of government expenditure, revenue and deficits on economic growth in developing countries. It is based on panel data of annual series over the last three decades for 103 countries, which are further classified into low-income...
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For many low-income countries, there has been an extended period in which fiscal policy was not a choice, or was a choice made by authorities external to the country. For a number of them, this situation is now changing. Their own success in stabilising the economy, coupled with a shift in the...
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Little is known about the extent to which public spending is targeted towards the poor in Mozambique. The objective of the present paper is to assess whether public expenditures on education and health, in particular, are successful at reaching the poorer segments of the Mozambican population...
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This paper analyses the impact of fiscal policy on private investment for a sample of thirty-three LDCs. The paper makes a number of important contributions to the existing empirical literature. Its main contribution is that it is the first attempt to analyse the existence of a non-linear...
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