The Phenomenal Rise of Asia

This is a monumental piece of work and a great service to the study of the phenomenal economic transformation of Asia that has unfolded over the last half century or so. Understanding this turn in global economic history is particularly important since the continent had suffered a century or more of no economic growth before the 1950s. It is timely too, in view of the greater salience of Asia’s role in the global economy today, and the likelihood of this becoming even more prominent in the coming decades as the fulcrum of the global economy does make an epochal move back from the Atlantic Ocean to the Indian Ocean, where it was 200 years ago. I would expect this book to serve as a key resource for the study of Asian resurgence for some time to come.

Asia has emerged as the fastest growing region in the world over this period. This constitutes a major transition from a situation when Asia (excluding Japan), in Deepak Nayyar’s words, was “the poorest continent in the world” (p 28). Fifty years ago, this transformation would have been thought of as unimaginable. The general prognosis for the future of Asia was essentially pessimistic.

The Story in Numbers