Crisis as Conquest

To what extent does the East Asian experience provide us with a viable model of economic development? This tract seeks to answer this through a careful analysis of the long-term development of the East Asian economies and their recent crisis. Powered by a rapid expansion of exports, these economies had achieved phenomenal growth rates in the 1980s. The tract shows the contradictory implications of this process of industrialisation and the problems of unregulated finance which makes liberalised economies extra sensitive to the slightest ripple in investor sentiments. To understand the specificities of the East Asian experience, the tract looks carefully at the histories of crisis in other parts of the world, and provides a powerful critique of the IMF response to them.

The East Asian economies had initially developed in opposition to the power of Western multinationals. The crisis within these eastern economies has now opened up the possibilities of a Western conquest, with multinationals from the west buying up bankrupt eastern industrial conglomerates.

Crisis as Conquest is a forceful and lucidly written tract that helps us understand the inner contradictions of the Eastern Miracle. It shows how we can learn from East Asia and rethink the strategies of economic development in India. This rethinking must begin by going beyond the old form of protectionism and isolationism as well as unrestrained liberalisation