Abstract

From the previous chapters of this book, we may wonder what the recent development of catching up and convergence are in East Asia. We may also wonder whether the East Asian economies are still viable or whether they dropped out of the scene like many other newly industrializing countries (NICs) did several decades ago. As we predicted in Chapters 2 and 3, Korea's high-tech industry has continued to grow. In fact, Korea eventually caught up with Taiwan. Korea's GDP per capita in current US dollars exceeded Taiwan's in 2010. Thus, in particular, we want to know whether and when the GDP per capita in purchasing power parity (PPP) of Korea can catch up with that of Taiwan, or whether the GDP per capita of Korea and Taiwan will converge to Japan or the United States.

More interestingly, we ask what the comparison of their economic performance is with some other advanced OECD countries like the United Kingdom, Germany, France and the Netherlands. Applying cross-section and time-series data, this chapter discusses these questions using some recent international statistics published by the IMF, the World Bank and the US CIA. The data were taken from 1980 to 2020. From the study of these datasets, it appears that East Asia is still emerging, and there seems no reason to discount the possibility of an Asia-centered world economy.

Introduction

In Chapters 6, 7 and 8, we have pointed out that Japan, Korea and Taiwan had high average growth rates in the world before World War II (1911– 40) in terms of real GDP per capita in Geary–Khamis dollars (see the explanation and derivation in Appendix 9A), but had the lowest average growth rates during the transition period (1941– 50). However, these countries had the highest average growth rates in the world during the postwar period (1951– 92) in the order of Taiwan (6.03%), Korea (5.8%) and Japan (5.57%).

In terms of long-run average growth rates including the prewar and postwar periods (1911– 92), the three also ranked the highest in the world, in the order of Japan (3.34%), Taiwan (3.04%) and Korea (2.98%) (see Table 7.1).