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Paper short abstract

The scholarship on middle-income trap is stuck. At the heart of the problem is the "East Asian exceptionalism": i.e., East Asians developed under a particular set of geopolitical conditions, and that they cannot be found elsewhere. I ask if these conditions were as exceptional as is often claimed.

Paper long abstract

In development studies, there is the long-standing critique of the growth paradigm that emerges from the modernisation theory, derived through the study of Western European Miracle with its institutions modelled as best institutions. Development scholars draw on the world systems and dependency theory point to the perennial structural constraints that make “catch-up” growth near impossible. Here, East Asian Miracle is deemed with ambivalence due to “East Asian exceptionalism”: i.e., that the East Asian Tigers developed their institutions under a particular set of geopolitical conditions, and that they cannot be found elsewhere. The premise of the paper is that this ambivalence is what is holding the middle-income trap scholarship back, and in order to suggest viable pathways to high-income transition, I compare two economic miracles: the Western and East Asian Miracles. Deploying sequential comparative historical analysis, I show that both miracles experience three sets of revolutions – i.e., military revolution, bourgeois revolution and disciplinary revolution – but that these revolutions take different forms and functions to reflect varying time and space considerations. The implications of my findings are that rather than viewing East Asia as an exception, it should be used as a rare case of success, and that the focus of middle-income trap research needs to be on teasing out the forms and functions of the three revolutions in ways that enable useful middle-range insights for other regions.