japan's economic performance from the 1950s to the late 1980s demonstrated that an economy devastated by war and with few natural resources could achieve rapid economic growth. Its performance during the 1950s and 1960s was so impressive that some commentators described it as an economic ‘miracle’. But could this enviable economic growth be repeated elsewhere? Was there a latent dynamism in the other economies of East and Southeast Asia that could give rise to economic growth as spectacular as Japan's? From the mid-1960s, several economies in the region did in fact achieve impressive economic growth, actually surpassing Japan during the 1980s. These are described as the Newly Industrialising Economies (NIEs) (or Newly Industrialising Countries, NICs). The most successful of these NIEs - South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore – have also been described as the ‘four little dragons’ (Vogel 1991), the ‘four tigers’ (World Bank 1993), and Asia's ‘miracle economies’ (Bello and Rosenfeld 1992; Woronoff 1986).

The economic success of Asia's ‘miracle economies’ has had a dramatic impact on the economy of the East and Southeast Asian region, as well as the world economy. It has also created significant benefits and opportunities for the Australian economy. In the decade 1986–95, Asian countries (not including Japan) purchased 30.56 per cent of Australia's exports, and exports to them grew fourfold. In 2002, exports to these countries stood at 34.5 per cent (DFAT 2003).