Over the past three decades, out of the nearly 200 countries that have sought to improve their development level, barely a dozen have truly realized sustainable improvement and perhaps another handful show promise (Harrison and Huntington 2000). The successful countries have been able to devise a favorable context for reform. Table 4.1 classifies all countries in terms of their relative possession of natural and human resources, and highlights by name those few countries that have made major recent gains in development. The countries in the top two quadrants have largely improved, thanks to their effective mobilization of investment funds derived from fossil fuels. In this recent historical period, the possession and effective marketing of oil and natural gas has been a godsend enabling several countries to experience rapid development, though others such as Chad, Nigeria, the Sudan, Venezuela, and even Indonesia have failed to take advantage of their opportunities.
The countries in the bottom two quadrants are far more numerous (including most of the so-called developing countries), yet only a handful have significantly improved their development level; and nearly all of these are located in East Asia, the so-called East Asian Newly Industrializing Countries (NICs) (Vogel 1992; World Bank 1993). In the 1950s, the level of development of the NICs was much lower than most of the countries in Africa and Latin America (Ferranti 2005), yet today the NICs are among the most prosperous countries in the world (Yoon 2002). Our interest in this chapter is in the reforms that are common to the East Asian NICs, and what determines the likelihood of these reforms taking root.
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Cummings, W.K. (2009). Capacity Building Strategies: East Asian Approaches. In: Hirosato, Y., Kitamura, Y. (eds) The Political Economy of Educational Reforms and Capacity Development in Southeast Asia. Education in the Asia-Pacific Region: Issues, Concerns and Prospects, vol 13. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-9377-7_5
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