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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 October 2015
In the early 1980s, the geographic boundaries defined in the title of this paper would have been drawn very differently from today.
Then, as now, there would have been no ambiguity about the inclusion of the ASEAN economies, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan and the Republic of Korea. Then, as now, there would have been no ambiguity about the exclusion of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. But that is the end of the consistency over time.
The People's Republic of China is now best considered as an Asian market economy. It was certainly not a market economy a decade ago. A large majority of production of goods and services is now independent of the state plan, and what is left of the plan scrambles to keep up with the signals emitted by powerful market forces.
When did the switch-over take place in China? There is no need, and no opportunity, to be precise. I would date it somewhere between the Thirteenth Communist Party Congress in 1987 and the Fourteenth in 1992 — between the Chinese Communist Party's acceptance of the doctrine of the “preliminary stage of socialism”, and its acceptance that China was a “socialist market economy”. If a journalist were pressing me for a single date, and I was too tired to resist, I would say May 1991, when large price adjustments for agricultural products including grain paved the path for market determination of food prices.
Are the economies of Indochina market economies? Vietnam's price and enterprise reforms are much younger than China's, but have proceeded more rapidly. The dynamic rural enterprises that have defined the “market-oriented” character of the Chinese economy since the mid-1980s do not so far have counterparts in Vietnam. The inflationary macro-economic environment is less conducive to smooth operation of markets than in China. But there is no doubt about the direction of change in Vietnam, and it is, as least, an Asian emerging market economy.
South Asia is hardest of all to define. Markets, relative to state power, are now less important in resource allocation in india than in China.
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