This paper argues that there was a long-term path of economic development in East Asia, which underpinned the "industrious revolution" since the seventeenth century and labour-intensive industrialisation since the late nineteenth century, and eventually produced the "East Asian miracle" during the second half of the twentieth century. Central to this path was its commitment to the improvement of the quality of labour. The improvement of the quality of life, expressed in education, health and housing, was also pursued from a relatively early stage in order to improve the quality of labour. The first half of the paper describes the interactions between "high initial conditions", international circumstances and government policies in postwar East Asia, and suggests that "developmentalism", an ideology adopted by many governments of the region's high growth economies, reflected its specialisation in labour-intensive industries in the global division of labour, based on the East Asian path, rather than its effort to "catch up" with the West. The paper then considers how development economics in the postwar period had neglected the question of the improvement of the quality of labour and life, and attributes some of the reasons for the rapid improvement in education and, to a lesser extent, health in East and Southeast Asian economies to the region's long-term commitment to "productivist" ideology. The success was also helped by the "mechatronics revolution", which combined the introduction of micro-electronics technology with traditional mechanical engineering in the 1970s and the 1980s. The speed at which new technology was adopted to consumer electronics, computer and other manufacturing and service industries was faster in East Asia than anywhere else, because the region was able to combine good-quality labour of all kinds, from unskilled to highly skilled, to produce competitive manufactured goods. It was the quality of labour that determined where the region's comparative advantage lay. The paper ends with comments on the development of "social policy" in East Asia. In the literature on development, "social policy" often means human development policy, and includes all areas of education, health, housing etc. as well as the traditional areas covered by welfare state policies such as social security and unemployment benefits. While Esping-Andersen's typology of welfare capitalism is formulated on the experience of the Western path of economic development, the East Asian path requires a different evaluation, on which to assess the history of a rather piecemeal introduction of Western-style welfare system to the region.
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