Description
The economic growth of Japan over the last 125 years has been faster than that of any other country in the world. With the collapse of the Soviet economy in the early 1990s, Japan has become the major non- Western model for late developing countries. This book looks at Japan's early economic modernization to see if today's low-income countries can learn any lessons. The author focuses on education, technology policy, capital formation, the transfer of savings from agriculture to industry, state aid to the private sector, improvement engineering in the informal sector, low wages, industrial dualism, export expansion, and resistance to Western imperialism (a strategy which included acquiring its own empire) under Japan's "guided capitalism." He criticizes modernization scholars for underemphasizing the damage of imperialism and the importance of economic au- tonomy and technological learning, the dependency school for pre- scribing trade reduction and neglecting market exchange-rate poli- cies, and world-system theorists for rejecting the possibility of global economic growth.
Dr. Nafziger notes that today's developing countries must be selective in choosing components of the Japanese model and concludes that the development model favored by Western countries, the IMP, and the World Bank resembles that of early capitalist Japan- economic liberalization with state action but with little attention to achieving political democracy.
