A nation’s economic development depends on institutions, as argued persuasively in the 1990 book by Douglass North. But what kinds of institutions are needed depends on the stages of economic development and also varies from country to country, as shown in Japanese institutional innovations such as keiretsu and Japanese management methods. Therefore, what a researcher needs to do is not to judge institutions by a certain fixed model but to observe how institutions are functioning and see where institutional improvements are needed for sustainable economic growth.
New institutional economics, particularly the branch concerned with a nation’s economic development, evolved in close relation to neo-classical economics. This is probably because those who pioneered the field were mostly US-based economists, among whom neo-classical economics dominates. But neo-classical economics, which heavily depends on the deductive approach, is not an ideal discipline to go into new institutional economics, because the latter requires case studies and has to depend on the inductive approach. Although those who study the relations between institutions and economic development have to be familiar with the mechanism of productivity increase, if they go into the study from area studies, they do not have to be bound by the quantitative, mathematical requirements of neo-classical economics and can look closely at the relations between institutions and productivity increase. Such investigation is especially needed for developing countries, where the role of institutions is poorly understood. Therefore, the attention of area specialists to institutions is needed, and for them to go in that direction will be richly rewarded since they have a comparative advantage in studying institutions.

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The East Asian Miracle, the World Bank's largest selling publication, is the outcome of the concerted operations of Japan's Ministry of Finance and the Overseas Economic Cooperation Fund (OECF) ; the objective was to urge the World Bank to make an in-depth study of the role of government in the East Asia's development achievements.

In the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s, structural adjustment was a dominant stream in international development circles. The prescription, or the Washington Consensus, was based on Neoclassical economics and shared by the US Treasury, the World Bank and the IMF. However, a group of government officials and academics in Japan were critical of market fundamentalism and“one size fits all” pattern of the structural adjustment policy packages. After a series of hot dispute, particularly on the financial sector reform in the Philippines, MOF and OECF made up their mind to challenge the orthodoxy. They presented a provocative paper to the annual meeting with the World Bank. Dani Rodrik described the confrontation“King Kong versus Godzilla.”

In spite of“inelegance,”the OECF paper attracted considerable attention. Under the circumstance, the World Bank agreed to have a study of public policy in East Asia, with the Japanese funding.

The East Asian Miracle report tried hard to conserve the World Bank's orthodoxy. It concluded that industrial policy, the most controversial subject, was“largely ineffective.”However, it resorted to acknowledge extensive government activism, including directed credit, another controversial topic, and export promotion. In retrospect, The East Asian Miracle was the beginning of the decline of Washington consensus; afterwards in 2004, President Wolfensohn announced“The Washington consensus has been dead.”

Japan's challenge to the development norm could furnish developing countries with useful hints, as they must express themselves under the inequal donor-recipient relationship.

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Paul Krugman attracted attention when he said that East Asian growth, unaccompanied by technological innovation, would soon come to a dead end as was the case with the USSR. The purpose of this paper is, in an attempt to probe into what has made Vietnamese economic success possible, to analyze the production structure and the input factor in Vietnam by growth accounting method, production function analysis and labor mobility index method. The results are as follows.
Firstly, the T. F. P. improves a little in the primary and in the secondary industry, but not in the tertiary industry. The improvement starts in the primary industry in the early 1980's, mainly because the period marks the beginning of an economic reformation which helps bring about free disposal of crops and expansion of hyper-productivity rice. In the secondary industry, however, the improvement does not begin to occur until in the nineties, when the government's economic open policy makes the domestic market accessible to foreign investors.
Secondly, land productivity changes for the better in the primary industry, although labor productivity and capital productivity remain unchanged. This is due to land restriction measures taken in agriculture. In the secondary industry, on the other hand, labor productivity goes upgrade while capital productivity declines. This is brought about by labor saving innovation resulting from new technologies from abroad and by regal restrictions arising from the minimum wage system.
Thirdly, the changes in production patterns prompt the working force to move from farm villages to industrial cities. In the latter half of the eighties, they move mainly to the secondary and the tertiary industry. But in the nineties, this flow declines because of fewer job opportunities in the secondary industry. Superfluous job-hunters try to find their way into the informal sector.

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This paper studies the effects of the changing age composition and education of the labor force on labor productivity growth in Singapore. A quality index was constructed to estimate the effects of different age and educational groups on the labor productivity growth. The results indicate that young workers with university degrees contribute significantly to the labor productivity growth of the economy. However, older workers between the ages of 40 and 49 have tended to increase their contribution to labor productivity growth over time. In particular, the labor productivity growth tended to peak between the ages of 30 and 39 in 1984-89, but between the ages of 40 and 44 in 1990-99. This result suggests that older workers have become more productive as the economy moved towards more skilled and knowledge-intensive production. However, the results also suggest that productivity of older workers is lower in sectors undergoing rapid structural change such as the manufacturing sector, as opposed to the less structurally vulnerable sector such as the service sectors. It is a vital question, therefore, how Singapore reallocated types of labor among industries to optimize economic growth.

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In this paper we analyze the change of Korean trade structure with application of the 1975-80-85 link Input-Output table. According to the economic development, the trade structure also changes drastically. Our main topics are following. First, has Korea's trade structural change been the import-augmentative one? Second, if the import-substitution process can be observed, is it grounded on the technological progress that makes the Korean domestic products more internationally competitive?
Our quantitative investigation shows that the import-substitution process has steadily deepened from light industries to heavy industries. Moreover, most of the sectors accomplished the cost reducing technological change. The volume of imtermediate input imports, however, increased especially during the 1980-85 period.
This study suggests that the increasing import of the intermediate input can contribute to the cost reducing technological progress that pushes the Korean manufactured goods aggressively into the international market.

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This paper analyzes the global marketing activities of electronics industry enterprises in Asian Newly Industrializing Economies (A-NIES), by comparing case-study of Acer Group in Taiwan and Samsung Electronics in South Korea, both of which have been successfully catching up with Japanese and US corporations and developing into the global players. The prevalence of information technologies due to the IT revolution has enabled some of the A-NIES' enterprises to react promptly to diversifying and fluctuating consumers demands in the global market. Acer Group has achieved to establish the flexible and decentralized marketing model by restructuring its organizations enough to cope with these new demands. Samsung Electronics is seeking to be the biggest DRAM producer in coordination with the trend of establishing worldwide supply chain among the leading corporations by developing open-architectured production system. Concentrating its management resources on DRAM production, Samsung can become one of the most influential enterprises in the global semiconductor market. This study shows the importance of corporate reorganization to meet consumers needs and productive specialization. At the same time, however, both enterprises face some technological or financial difficulties. They need to renovate their marketing strategies in order to become more sophisticated or profitable players in the contemporary global market.

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This paper aims to reveal the mechanism of how prudential policy such as differential regulations and corrective actions resulted in unexpected outcomes in Thailand, and thereby to demonstrate the features of the prudential policy of the Bank of Thailand (BOT).
The prudential policy of BOT is considered characteristic in the following respects. Firstly, BOT is the major enforcing agency of prudential policy in Thailand. After the three laws related to finance (Bank of Thailand Act, Commercial Banking Act, Act on the Undertaking of Finance Business, Securities Business and Credit Foncier Business) were revised in 1985, BOT became the supervisor and de facto regulator for local commercial banks as well as finance companies. Secondly, while pursuing prudential policy, BOT had to take commercial banks into consideration in order to obtain their cooperation in implementing monetary policy. Thirdly, prudential policy was pursued consistently by BOT in order to maintain the credibility of the domestic financial market, especially in the eyes of foreign investors. Prior to the economic bubble bursting in 1996, the purpose was to attract international funds to underpin economic growth. On the contrary, BOT attempted to stop the outflow of international short-term funds after 1996. At the same time, the economical and financial situation of Thailand has gone through rapid changes. This, together with the above features of prudential policy, brought the unintended results in reality.
This paper’s originality lies in the demonstration of the overall features of prudential policy in Thailand even though this failed to prevent the severe destabilization of the financial system. This paper presents a new view on further discussions related to the Asian currency crisis.

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