10 - Conclusion

Summary

A massive debate over the origins of the East Asian economic miracles has focused primarily on political and economic decisions taken in the last fifty years. In searching for the origins of strong developmental states, the farthest back in history some have gone is to credit Japanese imperialism of the early 20^th century as creating developmental states in Korea and Taiwan. Yet the Japanese colonial experience cannot explain China’s phenomenal economic growth in the past four decades. We move the arguments for organized, institutionalized, orderly East Asian societies back at least one thousand years. In this concluding chapter, we show that many of the “institutionalist” arguments from North, Weingast, and others that purport to explain European economic success over the centuries are totally wrong in the East Asian context. Not only do these East Asian countries have states far earlier than in Europe, they also did not develop central banks or external finance: their massive state operations were financed solely by tax revenues over more than one thousand years. This is a challenge to almost all economic history.