Nber Working Paper Series East Asian Financial And
NBER WORKING PAPER SERIES EAST ASIAN FINANCIAL AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT Randall Morck Bernard Yeung Working Paper 23845 http://www.nber.org/papers/w23845 NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138 September 2017 This working paper is intended for the Handbook of Finance and Development. We are grateful to the editors, Thorsten Beck and Ross Levine for helpful comments and suggestions. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications. © 2017 by Randall Morck and Bernard Yeung. All rights reserved. Short sections of text, not to exceed two paragraphs, may be quoted without explicit permission provided that full credit, including © notice, is given to the source. East Asian Financial and Economic Development Randall Morck and Bernard Yeung NBER Working Paper No. 23845 September 2017 JEL No. G0,N25,N35,O1,O16,O53,P1,P11,P5 ABSTRACT Japan, an isolated, backward country in the 1860s, industrialized rapidly to become a major industrial power by the 1930s. South Korea, among the world’s poorest countries in the 1960s, joined the ranks of First World economies in little over a single generation. China now seems poised to follow a similar trajectory. All three cases highlight the importance of marginalized traditional elites, intensive early investment in education, a degree of economic openness, free markets, equity financing, early-stage coordination of firms in diverse industries via arrangements such as business groups, and political institutions capable of curbing the power of families grown wealthy in early-stage rapid development to make way for prosperity sustained by efficient resource allocation to high-productivity firms.
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