Response Paper #6 from Lisa M. Beck Module - Asia Tuesday, November 18, 2014

Before I turned even the first page of How Asia Works by Joe Studwell, I read the jacket cover,

something I don’t often do. Though I had ordered the paperback version of this book, it has yet

to arrive. Fortunately, my local library had a copy and I was thankful they had one to borrow.

The library copy is a hard back version complete with that shiny, plastic cover libraries often like

to protect their books with. On the inside, flap I found the start of a summary of the book. The

first paragraph of it reads

In the 1980s and 1990s many in the West came to believe in the myth of an East-Asian

economic miracle, with countries seen not as just development prodigies but as a unified

bloc, culturally and economically similar, and inexorably on the rise. But heady economic

growth rates masked the most divided region in the world – one half the most

extraordinary developmental success story ever seen, the other half a paper tiger.

The phrase “paper tiger” caught my eye for some reason and kind of lingered with me. I thought

to myself, Who were the paper tigers and why? Studwell explains that some of these “paper

tigers,” such as the Phillippines, Indonesia, and Thailand never became “development

prodigies” due to complex issues related to agriculture that hindered development. Agriculture,

or more specifically, “[maximizing] output from agriculture” is one of Studwell’s main theories for

explaining why some Asian countries – the ones in the northeast -- achieved greater economic

successes than their southeastern neighbors. It is no secret that no matter how good

something is, it isn’t likely to last forever and policies are no exception, no matter how good they

may be at the start. Studwell advocates adaptable policies. He writes, “As the economic

environment unfolds, good policies that remain unchanged eventually turn into bad ones” (p.

61). If good policies are able to endure change and challenge, like origami, they can morph into

whichever form is needed for survival and, ultimately, success. If they cannot, like a tiger made

of paper, they may appear as if they have the potential to be a king of the jungle, but they

won’t be.