Four East Asian Dragons
a.k.a. East Asian Tigers
This is the name that designates the four countries in East Asia that showed outstanding growth in national income during the 1960's-1980's while other developing nations failed to grow or even declined. In Korean they are called 동아시아의 네 마리 용. The phonomenon was also called the "East Asian Economic Miracle".
They are:
The question of what conditions or what policies caused these countries to grow was a subject of substantial debate amongst economists during the early 1990's. One hypothesis is that these countries pursued export-oriented industrialization, while other countries followed policies of import sustitution. This exposure of the exporting firms to international competition forced them to be efficient in order to be able to produce goods that would sell in foreign markets. In addition, these exporting firms were able to immediately take advantage of returns to scale by producing for the global market.
This debate preceded the East Asian Financial Crisis, which brought a bit of levity to the discussion, introducing some of the flaws of the path of development that the East Asian Dragons had taken.
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