Emergent Economies, Divergent Paths: Economic Organization and International Trade in South Korea and Taiwan

The economies of South Korea and Taiwan in the second half of the twentieth century are to scholars of economic development what the economy of Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century is to economic historians. This book, a collaboration between a leading trade economist and a leading economic sociologist specializing in East Asia, offers a fresh, original explanation of the development paths of post-World War II Korea and Taiwan. The ambitions of the authors go beyond this, however. They use these cases to reshape the way economists, sociologists, and political scientists will think about economic organization in the future. They offer nothing less than a theory of, and extended evidence for, how capitalist economies become organized. One of the principal empirical findings is that a primary cause for the industrialization of East Asia is the retail revolution in the United States and the demand-responsiveness of Asian manufacturers.