Policy Regimes and Industrial Competitiveness: A Comparative Study of East Asia and India

"This is a unique perspective on the political economy of industrial policymaking in East Asia and India. The book is valuable for both its statistical data and analysis, and for its political-economic approach to policy, and will be of interest to policymakers as well as scholars (Asian-Pacific Economic Literature).

The late 1990s crisis in East Asia did not change the fact that many of these economies had previously experienced three decades or more of rapid, sustained and equitable growth. This book looks at the economic performance of East Asia in a unified way. The focus is on the common forces, generated by each country's policies, that jointly produced such successful outcomes. The framework used allows us to identify the separate roles of macroeconomic and microeconomic factors, and to understand how they interacted with one another.
          In order to gain a comparative perspective, the same framework is used to examine the somewhat less successful performance of the Indian economy. The basic lesson of the analysis is that it is generally difficult to categorize policies as "good" or "bad" per se. Rather, it is the overall institutional context in which policies are implemented that determine their success or failure.