Factor Endowments, Trade Direction, and Growth Performances of the Americas and East Asia in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Hongyi Harry Lai
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Hongyi Harry Lai: University of California at Los Angeles

Development and Comp Systems from EconWPA

Abstract: Factor-endowment based trade with the leading economy helps to explain the differing development performances of the Americas and East Asia in the past two centuries. Between 1830 and 1945, labor-abundant Britain, the most advanced country, traded heavily with land-abundant countries in the Americas, the U.S. in particular. The latter were able to grow faster than was most of East Asia. After WWII, however, with Britain’s decline and the rise of the land-abundant U.S., labor-abundant East Asia traded more heavily with the U.S. and thus engineered faster growth than did land-abundant Latin America. Factor-endowment based trade and economic ties with the secondary advanced economy (first the U.S. and then Japan) played important roles in the pre-WWII growth of Japan, Southeast Asia's growth in the 1970s and the 1980s, and its economic crisis in the mid-1990s.

Keywords: growth; development; trade; factor; endowments; resources; economic performances; developmental policies; world economy; Latin America; America; the United States; U.S.; East Asia; Southeast Asia; Britain; United Kingdom; U.K.; Japan; China; Malaysia (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O11 O57 N10 F11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1997-10-22, Revised 1998-06-17
Note: A revised version; an old and longer version was posted in 10/97. Type of Document - MS Word 6.0 for Win95 or later version; prepared on IBM PC ; to print on HP ; pages: 38 ; figures: 8 tables.
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