Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. xx, 295pp. (Tables, graphs, figures) US$40.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-19-884951-3.
Deepak Nayyar’s Resurgent Asia takes its inspiration from Gunnar Myrdal’s Asian Drama: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations, published 50 years earlier. The latter was a 1968 magnum opus of over 2000 pages, spanning three volumes, and focusing on developmental economics and the politics of poverty. At the time, Myrdal expressed a pessimistic view about Asia and the region’s future. He certainly did not foresee that the economies of China and India would come to rival that of the US in little more than half a century. In contrast, and almost as if in redress, Nayyar has sought with Resurgent Asia to retrace the phenomenal transformation of Asia with a “wide angle” analytical narrative that is situated in a historical perspective.
After a brief prologue that sets out the context of the book, Resurgent Asia proceeds in what can be construed as two sections. The first, spanning chapters 1 to 5 and chapter 7, describes the economic and demographic transformation of Asia by marshalling an impressive set of descriptive statistics, which Nayyar has compiled for the purposes of the book. The reader will encounter a wide range of economic data (income, savings, investment, capital flows, trade, sectoral output, remittances, inequality) and some selected social indicators (population size, life expectancy, literacy, birth rate).
The data presented in chapters 1 and 2 traces a wide historical arc of the region, beginning with 1820 when Asia’s share of world GDP was approximately 57 percent; to 1970 when Asia’s share of world GDP plummeted to less than 10 percent and became the poorest continent in the developing world; and finally 2016, when that share bounced back to approximately 30 percent. In between discussions of the various statistics, Nayyar offers brief historical vignettes of the region’s integration with the world economy and economic conditions that were to be found in the region at the end of colonialism. There is an extensive discussion of the drivers of growth in chapter 3, as well as a consideration of the relationship between economic growth, macroeconomic policies, and employment. Nayyar traces structural changes—that is, shifts in the relative importance of the agricultural, manufacturing, and industrial sectors—of the Asian-14 countries (defined below) in chapter 4. In chapter 5 Nayyar offers an account of the different paths taken by the Asian-14 towards industrialization. In chapter 7, we find a discussion on economic inequality between and within countries.
The data is presented in intervals (generally, decadal) rather than as full time-series. In order to offer a more fine-grained analysis, Nayyar frequently disaggregates the region into East, West, South, and Southeast Asia. The focus of the discussions in chapters 3, 4, and 5 are narrowed even further to a subset of 14 selected economies—China, South Korea, and Taiwan in East Asia; Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam in Southeast Asia; Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka in South Asia; and Turkey in West Asia—which account for more than four-fifths of the population and income of the wider Asian region.
Chapters 6, 8, and 9 form the second distinct section of the book, in which readers will find more free-ranging discussions of the relationship between government and markets (chapter 6), the engagement of Asian countries with the international economy (chapter 8), and possible lessons for other countries stemming from Asia’s experience, and speculation on the future of the region (both chapter 9).
Resurgent Asia is an impressive book. The data compiled specifically for the manuscript is formidable for its historical and geographical breadth. Herein lies the significant value of the book, particularly with the comparative statistics and rich insights that were and can be derived from the dataset. The statistics paint a thick canvas of detail and variation in the trajectories of Asian economies. Nayyar weaves a good narrative in presenting and analyzing the data. The quantitative material is set against a historical context, which many readers will find helpful. The book also refers to a number of key debates that have accompanied the history of Asia’s economic development, such as the role of industrial policy and government intervention. The empirics of the book underline the diversity of the development experience of individual countries in Asia, and as Gunnar Myrdal did before him, Nayyar reminds us of the importance of taking an institutional approach that embraces social, cultural, and political contexts in order to understand the individual trajectories of these economies.
The book is less successful in its stated intention to “enhance our understanding of development processes and outcomes in Asia over the past fifty years, [and] draw out the analytical conclusions that contribute to contemporary debates on development” (6). As far as I could ascertain, the project was not conceived and set up to systematically identify causes and proffer rigorous explanations for the developmental experience of Asian economies. Instead, its primary focus and contribution lies in the compilation and transformation of the large set of data that is the foundation of the descriptive statistics presented in the book. Given that this is where the value of the project is to be found, it is a little disappointing that the dataset is not made available publicly, thus potentially contributing to further work and enabling other insights. Those interested in a deeper understanding of the causal forces shaping Asia’s development experience would probably be better served by many other publications that are available, including Asian Transformations: An Inquiry into the Development of Nations (Oxford University Press, 2019), a companion volume to Resurgent Asia and also edited by Nayyar.
Nayyar’s Resurgent Asia will find a ready audience in social scientists, historians, and policy makers. It will serve as a good primer or reference for anyone interested in the economies of Asia, and in their transformation since the mid-twentieth century. Many researchers should also find good fodder for their own work in the statistics offered in the book.
Jikon Lai
Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Singapore