East Asian economies seem to be rather special in terms of their development and transition performance since the Second World War. Development ‘miracles’ occurred in the NIEs in east Asia and transitional miracles in China and Vietnam. If, as I have argued, social thought is the deepest and most fundamental determinant of government policy and social and economic institutions in a country – in turn determining a country's economic performance – why is it that, despite the prevailing social thinking about development in the 1950s and 1960s and about transition in the 1980s and 1990s, the east Asian governments behaved so differently and achieved such miraculous economic success? My analysis is incomplete without an answer to this question.

As discussed, China, Vietnam and other east Asian economies adopted a dual-track, gradualist approach in their transition from centrally planned economies to market economies, which violated the basic tenets of the Washington Consensus and the shock therapy treatment. In effect, for its transition from a wartime economy after the Second World War, Japan also adopted a gradual approach, whereas Germany adopted a big-bang approach (Teranishi, 1994). In terms of the development policies in South Korea and Taiwan, both governments initially adopted a policy mix – including financial repression, overvalued exchange rates, deficit budgets and neglect of the agricultural sector – to support the development of labour-intensive primary manufacturing industries in order to reduce the need for imports of manufactured household products: a policy referred to as ‘primary import substitution’.