Exploring the three varieties of East Asia's state-guided development model: Korea,Singapore, and Taiwan

In the postwar era, the East Asian state-guided development model has worked well to create successive economic miracles in the region. However, the enduring variances of the individual economies in East Asia still remain. This article explores the empirical diversities hidden behind the intra-regional commonalities. In particular, on the “growthstability-equity” spectrum, the East Asian development paradigm could be sub-divided into three categories: South Korea's “growth-obsessed” pattern (G); Singapore's “growth-with-stability” model (G-S); and Taiwan's “equity-and-stability-based growth” model (G-S-E). Largely derived from the deliberate political choice of a particular strategic path, each model of East Asia has materialized on the basis of strong developmentalist states. However, unlike the multi-goal options (G-S/G-S-E), as in Singapore and Taiwan, the mono-goal options ((G), as in Korea, could gain the chosen objective at considerable cost to the neglected dimensions. As a result, given a set of necessary political conditions, the multi-goal options are a better choice for Third World policy practitioners than are the mono-goal options.