Affiliating Labour: New Perspectives

In the 1980s and 1990s, a series of academic studies were released that tried to explain the East Asian growth miracle in Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea (Amsden, 1989, Haggard and Cheng, 1987, Haggard and Moon, 1990). The central puzzle that political economists explained through these case studies of East Asian Newly Industrialized Countries (NICs), was centered on how these countries had managed to achieve phenomenal levels of industrial growth in a remarkably short span of time. In other words, the studies were concerned with isolating certain factors that had contributed to the economic growth of the NICs and were mulling over whether these countries were also developmental states like Japan had once been.