How Asia Works Quotes

“The easiest way to run developmentally efficient finance continues to be through a banking system, because it is banks that can most easily be pointed by governments at the projects necessary to agricultural and industrial development. Most obviously, banks respond to central bank guidance. They can be controlled via rediscounting loans for exports and for industrial upgrading, with the system policed through requirements for export letters of credit from the ultimate borrowers. The simplicity and bluntness of this mechanism makes it highly effective. Bond markets, and particularly stock markets, are harder for policymakers to control. The main reason is that it is difficult to oversee the way in which funds from bond and stock issues are used. It is, tellingly, the capacity of bank-based systems for enforcing development policies that makes entrepreneurs in developing countries lobby so hard for bond, and especially stock, markets to be expanded. These markets are their means to escape government control. It is the job of governments to resist entrepreneurs’ lobbying until basic developmental objectives have been achieved. Equally, independent central banks are not appropriate to developing countries until considerable economic progress has been made.”
― Joe Studwell, How Asia Works

“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.”
― Joe Studwell, How Asia Works

“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.”
― Joe Studwell, How Asia Works

“food prices in Japan are 60 per cent higher than world market prices, and the price of rice is a multiple of the world price. A sense of the extremity of the situation is given by the fact that a single apple in Japan can cost USD5. On my trip from Tokyo to Niigata, I bought apples in convenience stores in Tokyo and Chichibu for USD4 and USD3 respectively, although I balked at paying USD10 for ten strawberries.123 You know that something is wrong when a few strawberries cost what Japan’s lowest-paid temporary workers now make in an hour.”
― Joe Studwell, How Asia Works

“It is the job of governments to resist entrepreneurs’ lobbying until basic developmental objectives have been achieved.”
― Joe Studwell, How Asia Works

“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.”
― Joe Studwell, How Asia Works

“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”
― Joe Studwell, How Asia Works

“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.”
― Joe Studwell, How Asia Works

“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.”
― Joe Studwell, How Asia Works

“Imported consumer goods were either banned or enormously expensive due to high tariffs,”
― Joe Studwell, How Asia Works

“When the state did not provide the right direction to finance, developmental outcomes were different. Nineteenth-century Spain had a large number of investment banks which did nothing to promote industrialisation. This was largely because Spanish company law favoured railroad investment but discriminated against manufacturers. As a result, the Spanish banks financed thousands of kilometres of rail lines, for which all the rolling stock was imported and for which there were no manufactures to transport. After a banking crisis in the 1870s, Spain remained thoroughly un-industrialised.”
― Joe Studwell, How Asia Works

“Ladejinsky was the most important adviser to the US government on agricultural issues in Asia. A naturalised American born in the Ukraine in 1899, who had fled the Russian Revolution, he recalled that: ‘I came to this [work] chiefly as a result of a lesson I learned from my experience before I left Russia in early 1921, namely that the communists would never have attained political power if they had not dealt with the land question resolutely, by turning the land over to the peasants.”
― Joe Studwell, How Asia Works

“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.”
― Joe Studwell, How Asia Works

“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.”
― Joe Studwell, How Asia Works