East Asian Renaissance: Ideas for Economic Growth

The World Bank has completed a major study of East Asian growth every four years, beginning with the seminal The East Asian Miracle in 1993. Three major developments since the early 1990s call for a reexamination of East Asian growth: the meteoric rise of China, the economic crisis of the nineties, and the rapid growth of cities. This report addresses how development strategies should be adapted in response to these changes. The region has been transformed by these developments, changing from a set of countries that rapidly integrated with the world to one that is also aggressively exploiting the sources of dynamism that lie within Asia. But countries in East Asia now face the domestic side-effects of rapid growth driven by international integration: congestion, conflict, and corruption. The challenge now is to complement global and regional integration with domestic integration. This requires ensuring vibrant cities that are not only linked to the outside world but also well-integrated domestically, strengthening social cohesion and reducing inequality, and providing clean governments which efficiently reinvest the economic returns that accompany fast growth.