East Asia encompasses a variety of post-war development experiences. It is best known for its four super-exporters – Hong Kong, Republic of Korea, Singapore and Taiwan – which have developed an effective pattern of outward-oriented industrialization. It also includes countries such as Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia, which have been quite successful with more traditional strategies of resource-based development, as well as China, until recently an example of autarkic growth. In all these cases, comparisons with countries outside the region can help to separate the common features of economies at a similar stage in development from the effects of particular policies.

To learn from this diverse experience, we need a common theoretical framework if not a fully articulated model of each country. Here I will start from the suggestion of Little (1982:26) that development theories can be regarded as a spectrum ranging from neoclassical to structuralist, with many analyses and policy prescriptions having elements of both. Since no single framework seems to fit the range of East Asian experience and available data, I will draw on models from different points in the spectrum. This approach can be described as the method of model-based comparisons. Perhaps the best-known example is the series of country studies stemming from Solow's (1957) neo-classical growth equation, which is taken up first.

The drawback to adopting a single analytical framework is that it limits the range of questions and initial conditions that can be explored. For example, the pure neo-classical model tells us little about the kinds of structural disequilibria that prevailed in most developing countries in the 1950s, since it is based on assumptionsthat ensure the maintenance of equilibrium in factor and product markets.