Abstract
Autore:
Angelino Antonio
Titolo:
"Il “miracolo asiatico” nei documenti della World Bank (modelli di industrializzazione a confronto dagli anni ’90 alla crisi globale)"
The article analyses the evolution of the World Bank approach towards the Asian development experiences between the beginning of the Nineties and the Great Recession (2007). Throughout the last two decades, the WB publications have considered the Asian performances as a laboratory to test the validity of its reform attempts and the maintenance of its dominant paradigm. In particular, the success of East Asia has been a highly controversial topic since the publication of East Asian Miracle. Growth and Public Policy by WB in 1993, as a result of a contrast between opposite conceptions of growth: the Asian Developmental model promoted by the Japanese rising power and the Anglosaxon-style neoliberal approach represented by the Washington Consensus. The study, which embraced the neoliberal approach, explicitly underestimated the role of public intervention and selective industrial policies in the successful development pattern of the eight High Performing East Asian Economies, promoting the market-friendly ASEAN-3 reform approach as the best model to emulate. The Asian crisis (1997-98) led to the emergence of the contradictions characterizing the Washington Consensus. Meanwhile, the fact that the World Bank turned into a battleground between the guardians of the orthodoxy and the advocates of reform triggered a challenge-response dynamic clearly recognizable through the ambivalence of many WB documents, and finally led to the the Post-Washington Consensus. Despite this shift, the WB publications during 2000s persisted in underestimating the crucial role of the state intervention and industrial policies by utilizing the new notion of Middle Income Trap as an explanation for the empirical failures of the convergence theory in Southeast Asia. Through the review of the WB studies, two different industrialization models are compared with a specific focus on industrial policies and their role in shaping a sustainable and less dependent productive environment.
