State Development Planning: Did it Create an East Asian Miracle?

Benjamin Powell ()

The Review of Austrian Economics, 2005, vol. 18, issue 3, 305-323

Abstract: East Asian countries have recorded large increases in per capita GDP over the last fifty years. Some observers have referred to this growth as an “East Asian Miracle.” One popular explanation attributes the rapid growth to state led industrial development planning. This paper critically assesses the arguments surrounding state development planning and East Asia’s growth. Whether the state can acquire the knowledge necessary to calculate which industries it should promote and how state development planning can deal with political incentive problems faced by planners are both examined. When we look at the development record of East Asian countries we find that to the extent development planning did exist, it could not calculate which industries would promote development, so it instead promoted industrialization. We also find that what rapid growth in living standards did occur can be better explained by free markets than state planning because, as measured in economic freedom indexes, these countries were some of the most free market in the world. Copyright Springer Science + Business Media, Inc. 2005

Keywords: East Asia; industrial planning; economic calculation; economic freedom; development planning (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11138-005-4015-x (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:revaec:v:18:y:2005:i:3:p:305-323

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ce/journal/11138/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s11138-005-4015-x

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of Austrian Economics is currently edited by Peter Boettke and Christopher Coyne

More articles in The Review of Austrian Economics from Springer, Society for the Development of Austrian Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().