Date: Tue, 2 Sep 1997 14:33:36 -0700 (PDT)
From: Dennis R Redmond <dredmond-AT-gladstone.uoregon.edu>
Subject: M-TH: Re: Query & Comment on East Asia


On Tue, 2 Sep 1997, Rob Schaap wrote:

> What do you think about Krugman's idea about the new Asian economies being
> paper tigers?

It depends which Asian economies we're talking about. Singapore, Hong
Kong, Taiwan, South Korea and Japan are clearly the core economies of the
region, and can handle anything the Americans or Europeans throw at them.
Their neo-colonies, namely Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Burma, Vietnam,
North Korea and the Philippines, are heavily indebted, in some
cases growing fast but not as fast per capita as the tigers did in their
boom years, and are exhibiting all the incipient signs of neocolonization
(e.g. Thailand doesn't spend enough on education, has no developmental
state worthy of the name, has no real long-term industrial policy, and has
the worst wealth inequities of any country anywhere -- all very Brazilian
attributes). Not every semi-periphery gets to be a metropole: in Europe,
postwar Italy and Austria made it to the core, partly due to their trade
links to the Central European export-machine but mostly because of
powerful Leftwing parties and unions, and strong and effective
developmental states, which ensured the reinvestment of the social surplus
in domestic industry and not Swiss real estate; but Spain, Portugal and
Greece didn't (they did however grow 7-10% a year during the Sixties and
early Seventies). The task of the European Union, of course, will be to
restart another long wave of accumulation, this time centered around
Central and Eastern Europe instead of America; my question concerning
East Asia can be boiled down to this: is an Asiastate on the horizon, or
will a rickety Japanese-Chinese-Korean confederation do the trick? 

Of course, I could be completely wrong about this, but objectively
speaking global capitalism is in severe crisis, and does need
supranational re-regulation and some sort of multinational
Keynesianism.

-- Dennis



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