LESSONS FOR LESS DEVELOPED COUNTRIES : (THE JAPAN AND USA CASES)

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

For nearly three decades, one of my favorite examination questions, for undergraduate and graduate students alike, has been the following: “The year is 1840 just prior to the Opium War. You are comparing the potential of China and Japan for economic development over the next one hundred years. Which of the two countries would you choose as more likely to make the greatest progress? Why?” Most if not all of my students quite rationally, given the time constraint of 1840 vision, choose China. After all, in 1840 China had a land area and resources many times that of Japan, a much larger population and labor force, and by far the richer, more varied, more promising economic history. Japan, comprising only four small heavily mountainous islands in toto about the size of California, with limited inanimate and human resources and a relatively unimpressive economic history, hardly merited mention in the same breath as China. Of course, as we all know, the next century was marked by extraordinarily rapid development on the part of Japan rather than China. By 1914, Japan was the leading industrial power in Asia and by the 1930s, after acquiring Formosa (now called Taiwan), Korea, and Manchuria, felt able to challenge the USA economically and politically in the Pacific and brought on World War II.

목차 (Table of Contents)

• Ⅰ. Introduction
• Ⅱ. Favorable Factors in Japan's Economic Development
• Ⅲ. The USA as a Model for LDC
• Ⅳ. Concluding Remarks
• ·FOOTNOTES