Quotes from Joe Studwell

The Philippines has no indigenous, value-added manufacturing capacity. At the end of the Second World War only Japan and Malaysia had higher incomes per capita in Asia. Then Korea and Taiwan overtook the Philippines in the 1950s. The country slid down past Thailand in the 1980s, and Indonesia more recently. From having been in a position near the top of the Asian pile, the Philippines today is an authentic, technology-less Third World state with poverty rates to match.

What created the Canons, the Samsungs, the Acers and so on in Japan, Korea and Taiwan was the marriage of infant industry protection and market forces, involving (initially) subsidised exports and competition between manufacturers that vied for state support.

Imported consumer goods were either banned or enormously expensive due to high tariffs,

Deregulation policies do not empower a 'natural' tendency for finance to lead a society from poverty to wealth, they simply put short-term profit and the interests of consumers ahead of developmental learning and agricultural and industrial upgrading. There is no case for doing this when a country is poor.

well. It is that a lot of critical learning in the most successful developing countries takes place outside the formal education sector. It occurs, instead, inside firms. This

It is that a lot of critical learning in the most successful developing countries takes place outside the formal education sector. It occurs, instead, inside firms. This intra-firm learning helps explain the relative failure of the former Soviet Union and its satellites, where investment in education and research was focused on elite universities and state research institutions rather than inside businesses.

Deininger's two big conclusions are that land inequality leads to low long-term growth and that low growth reduces income for the poor but not for the rich.

Not only has Japan developed with an impossibly small supply of cultivable land per capita, but large swathes of that land have been relentlessly gobbled up by its urban and industrial development. This trend has long been exacerbated by a cultural aversion to high-rise building. The insistence on low-rise, sadly, has done nothing to make modern Japanese construction more attractive.

Korea and Taiwan went from being the world's 33rd and 28th leading exporters in 1965 to being the 13th and 10th respectively twenty years later. At that point, both economies boasted greater manufacturing exports than the whole of Latin America.

South-east Asia's high savings rates, most of which flowed into bank deposits, lent themselves to outsize banking systems, which invited godfather abuse. There is, in turn, a pretty direct line from the insider manipulation

It is the job of governments to resist entrepreneurs' lobbying until basic developmental objectives have been achieved.

But the blame for the resultant situation, in as much as it needs to be attributed, belongs with politicians not with businessmen. It is the politicians' job to defend society's interests.

It is also worth recalling that tranquil Singapore maintains what is probably the highest rate of state executions in the world, well ahead of China or Saudi Arabia.32