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This chapter discusses various ways in which different countries and regions created their own path of economic development and industrialization, and the role the state played in them. The diffusion of industrialization over the last two centuries saw the emergence of a three-tier division of labour where capital-intensive industrialization, labour-intensive industrialization and the export economy of primary products characterized each region that has been integrated into the world economy. Among the countries of late development Japan in the late nineteenth century pursued labour-intensive industrialization, as its competitive advantage lay in the quality of labour relative to capital. In the twentieth century many countries pursued the state-led industrialization with emphasis on capital-intensive industries. In the late twentieth century, however, the developmental state such as Japan and NIEs pursued ‘developmentalism’, which combined imported resources including fossil fuels with competitive domestic resources such as labour of a good quality and natural resources such as water and biomass. It was important for the emerging state to create local, regional and long-distance trade to secure necessary resources for industrialization. The growth of intra-Asian trade ensured regional industrialization, while the proportion of intra-regional trade in Sub-Saharan Africa has been low until very recently. The experience of Southeast Asia shows the possibility of rapid structural transformation from the primary producer to the industrial region.

As in the case of any other sectors of the economy, the engine of agricultural growth in developing countries is the transfer of technology. This chapter pays a special attention to the role of transfer of intensive rice production systems from Japan to the former colonies of Taiwan and Kore before World War II, to tropical Asia in the 1960s to 1980s, and further to sub-Sharan Africa at present. What is found is that compared with other cereal crops lowland rice production technology is highly transferable from one major region to another. Another important point is that improved rice production system is not only intensive in the use of improved seeds and chemical fertilizer but also in “management,” including bunding, leveling, and straight-row transplanting. Therefore, in order to realize rice Green Revolution in Africa, it is critical to invest in training of rice farmers and extension workers. This chapter also explains how various other chapters dealing with agricultural issues in this volume are related with the issue of productivity growth of agriculture discussed in this chapter.

This chapter provides a general overview of the relations between international trade and the economy of Southeast Asia from a long-term perspective. After the short description about the relationships between natural endowments and international trade of Southeast Asia before the European arrival, this chapter is devoted to an analysis of international trade of Southeast Asia since the sixteenth century by focusing on the economic influences of international trade on the Southeast Asian economy and society. Southeast Asia has been in touch with a wide range of overseas markets in Asia and Europe. Large demands for Southeast Asian products have stimulated the economic development of the region. The economy was largely developed for the mass production of primary products. Development of the delta areas, introduction of the plantation system, and the acceptance of Chinese immigrants are good examples of the region’s capacity to respond to changes, before the production of manufactured goods became more important in the late twentieth century.

This chapter explores the significance of precolonial trade in the historical path of the economic development of Southeast Asia. During the Age of Commerce (c. 1450–1680) states played a prominent role in the promotion of trade. States militarily protected ports, created quarters for foreign traders to settle down, and controlled the production and trade of important export products. The state control of production and trade was possible and effective, because states mainly exported small-volume, high-value items such as precious spices and wood, which were produced in very limited areas. On the other hand, during the Age of China-oriented trade (c. 1750–1870), non-state commercial military groups, often called pirates, played an important role in local and regional trade. Their heavily armed fleets were effective to collect marine and forest products, which were now strongly demanded in China, in remote areas under weak state control. State control of production was no longer effective on these products, which could be collected in numerous places in insular Southeast Asia. As commercial transactions were conducted in numerous places, a large number of people came to be involved in market economy. When weak port states collapsed because of wars and other reasons, commercial military groups flexibly changed their trade ports. Because of their activities, local and regional trade in Southeast Asia had been active throughout the colonial period. As a result of these brisk trade activities, large parts of Southeast Asian society became dependent on trade, often importing food and other necessities from other regions. People became more accustomed to market economy and became increasingly market-oriented. These elements that had been developed through the early-modern trade were also important in the economic rise after the World War II and in more recent decades.

This chapter discusses one of the distinctive patterns of trade growth in nineteenth-century Southeast Asia by shedding light on the development of Singapore’s regional trade. Since the early nineteenth century, Singapore acted as an emporium involving various commodities and merchants, and became a port facilitating commodity circulations through regional trade with neighbouring countries as well as long-distance trade with faraway regions. By the mid-nineteenth century, industrial products and Southeast Asian produce became the primary contributors to Singapore’s trade growth, and Chinese merchants served as intermediaries between Western and native traders. Singapore’s regional trade began to reinforce the connection between production and consumption within the region by accelerating the intra-regional circulation of foodstuffs, which was instrumental in the remarkable growth of primary goods’ exports from Southeast Asia after the 1870s. The regional trade promoted the formation of the international division of labour with the Western industrial economy. This expansion allowed Singapore’s trade to integrate the local trading systems of Southeast Asian countries, which maintained autonomous dynamics within their respective domestic markets.

This chapter reconsiders the role of labour-intensive industrialization in pre-war Japan, by examining its role in import and export trade, with special attention paid to the development strategy. The chapter demonstrates that the development of import-substituting industries had to be complemented by export-oriented industries to relax the trade imbalance caused by the increase in imports, through exemplifying cases of cotton industries, followed by a discussion on the changing pattern of export-oriented industries, with a focus on urban small-scale manufacturers. Since there existed potential possibilities of moving from employees to employers through the establishment of their own workshops in the urban manufacturing sectors, juvenile workers were encouraged to invest in skill formation, and were expected to tolerate relatively low wage levels. The character of the workforce there was distinctively different from that of the cotton industries, which had been the major labour-intensive industry up to the interwar period, endowing Japan’s labour-intensive industrialization with its dynamic nature. At the same time, the achievement of the pre-war phase can be regarded as the forerunner of industries exporting finished consumer products to Western industrialized countries, which emerged after World War II, offering an insight into the critical opening to the understanding of post-war rapid economic growth, the last phase of the Japanese economy as an emerging state.

After the middle of the 19th century, China started to struggle for industrial development and eventually achieved it. This chapter proposes to discuss the process of China’s industrialization by distinguishing it into four periods, including the relatively short but critical period of wartime controlled economy, and by referring to the relative weights of three factors that have shaped the economic development of modern China, the global economy, private enterprises, and the government. Such an understanding will help us to situate Mao’s era in the whole process of China’s industrialization. We will also make it clear that China had developed two types of industrialization, capital-intensive industrialization and labour-intensive industrialization, and suggests that the wartime controlled economy under the Nationalist government played a particularly important role in this process.

Following a clear shift towards economic liberalisation in the 1980s, Indian economy has grown remarkably. One of the driving forces is the three-decade long expansion in the activities of private industrial enterprises, whose origins date back to the colonial era. Some activities even reached global standards in terms of production and employment, although the overall industrialisation level was far from sufficient. This chapter reviews the colonial India’s industrialisation, focusing on its stagnated nature and three known hypotheses on the causes of the stagnation; the factor endowment hypothesis; the laissez-faire economic policy hypothesis; and the sluggish technical transfer hypothesis.

Industrial policy has received renewed interest among researchers and policy makers in recent years because of failed industrial development in the developing world, the only exception being the Asian experiences. Based on simple conceptual framework, we illustrate how industrial policy can contribute to economic growth by enhancing labor productivity and reallocating labor from low-productive to high-productive sectors. Using macroeconomic data from Asian and sub-Saharan African countries, we present a sharp contrast between the two economies. Asian countries successfully achieved economic growth led by the industrialization, particularly in labor-intensive sectors, whereas African economies have long been stagnant, which can be attributed to the failure of industrialization. Finally, we discuss a feasible strategy for industrial development in Africa.

This chapter explores the causes and consequences of the long-term process of economic transformation in emerging economies in Asia and assesses to what extent such experience is being replicated in Africa. Economic transformation is defined broadly as the process whereby the foci of economic activities shift away from the agriculture to the industry and service sectors. We identified population pressure, modern agricultural technology, and human capital as three drivers of transformation using panel and repeated cross-section household-level datasets drawn from the Philippines, Vietnam, Myanmar, the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka in Asia and Mozambique, Kenya, Uganda, and Ethiopia in Africa. Our main finding is that the three drivers interact in a distinct way that, nonetheless, defines a common regional path to emerging economies, which highlights the role of agricultural development as a strong stimulus for economic transformation. The Asian sequence wherein the Green Revolution leads to higher farm income, investment in human capital, sustained nonfarm income growth and poverty reduction is becoming increasingly apparent in Africa as well.