Beyond Late Development: Taiwan's Upgrading Policies. By Alice Amsden and Wan-wen Chu. [Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003. 207 pp. ISBN 0-262-01198-0.]

Extract

Beyond Late Development offers economist Alice Amsden's most recent contribution (here with co-author Wan-wen Chu) to an already substantial body of work on East Asian political economy. Like her previous work, this book is important first because it trespasses the traditional boundaries of economics, seeking explanations to important developmental policy puzzles from institutional theories and empirical case studies more commonly the province of sociologists and area specialists; and second because it looks beyond Asia's mega-economies to the relatively smaller but still highly relevant late developers of Asia, offering important lessons for both students and practitioners of development policy.

Amsden and Chu seek to explain the ability of advanced “latecomer” countries to sustain their global competitiveness in mature high-technology manufacturing and newly-liberalized service industries. They support their argument with previously unpublished data and extensive firm-level interviews from Taiwan, the most successful of these successful latecomers, which Amsden identified in an earlier book, The Rise of “The Rest”(Oxford University Press, 2001). Although Taiwan's leading national firms seldom make the Fortune 500 list, they dominate global market share for many mature, information technology (IT) manufactures. As of 1999, Taiwan produced 85 per cent of the world's scanners, nearly two-thirds of the world's keyboards, power supplies and monitors, and almost 40 per cent of all notebook computers.