Accelerated Industrialization and Explosive Urbanization
During the two to three decades since the later half of the 1960s to the mid-1990s, Asia — especially East Asia — has achieved economic development of a rapidity unmatched anywhere else in the world. The World Bank focused on this in its 1993 policy resea
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Part of the Onsan industrial complex in South Korea. Local residents have been subject to a semi-obligator relocation program because of the grave pollution of the area. Photo: Oshima Ken'ichi
Japan Enviromental Council (ed.), The State of the Environment in Asia © Springer-Verlag Tokyo 2000
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1. East Asia at a Critical Juncture During the two to three decades since the later half of the 1960s to the mid-1990s, Asia - especially East Asia has achieved economic development of a rapidity unmatched anywhere else in the world. The World Bank focused on this in its 1993 policy research report (referred to below as "Bank report"), The East Asian Miracle, I in which it made the following statement. "East Asia has had a remarkable record of high and sustained economic growth. From 1965 to 1990 the twentythree economies of East Asia grew faster than all other regions of the world... Most of this achievement is attributable to seemingly miraculous growth in just eight economies: Japan; the "Four Tigers" - Hong Kong, the Republic of Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan, China; and the three newly industrializing economies (NIEs) of Southeast Asia, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand." Indeed, East Asia boasts a far higher average per capita GNP growth rate from 1965 to 1990 than other categories (Fig. 1; "East Asia" here includes all the low- and middleincome countries in East Asia and South Asia located in the eastern part of the region including China and Thailand, and in the Pacific). What's more, there is no doubt that Japan and the seven other economies in the World Bank quote above (termed "high-performing Asian economies," or HPAEs) have powerfully driven this economic growth. But there is perhaps dissent on whether to assess this process as the Bank report has done by praising it as a "marvelous record." For example, MIT Professor Paul Krugman and others see this East Asian economic growth as little more than the result of increasing inputs of labor and capital (Krugman characterizes it as "input-driven growth"), and some entertain serious doubts that such growth can be sustained. 2 While these may be somewhat extreme views, now that we have passed the midpoint of the 1990s it is clear that East Asia's Fig. 1 Average Growth Rate in Per Capita GNp, 1965-1990 (by world regions)
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growth as seen heretofore has arrived at a critical juncture, a fact symbolized by the chain-reaction economic crisis that began with the sudden drop in Thailand's currency in the summer of 1997. Further, if we liberate our field of view from the framework of narrow assessments such as "economic performance" (for instance, how much economic growth has been attained under the measure of GNP) based on market economy indicators like those noted above, and widen it to include "environmental performance" that includes the reality of serious and steadily accumulating pol
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