The East Asian Industrial Restructuring' Limit Under The Strategy Of Catching-up

The economy of East Asia has once been considered to be the successful model of the catching-up economy of which the characteristic is that the unbalanced development of economic restructuring strategies has the most fundamental and important position on it. During the process of economic restructuring, as the major component, the industrial restructuring has ensured its success and become the convincing reason for the realised catching-up. However, the series of facts, for instance , the stagnation of the Japanese economy in recent years, the Asian financial crisis and the enormous impact of U.S. subprime crisis on East Asian economies all state that industrial restructuring in East Asia has not been so successful, and it can not help but make people thinking that whether it has met the so called"limit"or not.Based on the theories of catching-up strategy and industrial structure theory, looking back the course of history of industrial restructuring in East Asia along with the catching-up strategy after the World War II and following the empirical analysis and comparison of actual data and experiences, this thesis firstly analysed the measures has been taken and considered as the main characteristics including the late-development advantages of industrial restructuring, technology import and system guarantee. And then further clarified the the restrictions these measures has been encoutered under the present circumstances including change of dual economy structure, upgrading of industry level, export restrictions on technology export and protection of intellectual property in develoed countries, development of intra-industry trade in East Asia, excessive government intervention, backward enterprise system, imperfection of property rights and some other changes occurred in social economic environment. Nowadays the emergence of so many restrictions indicates that the late-development advantages of industrial restructuring do not exist again, the methods of importing technology are vanishing gradually and the system guarantee conditions have become obstacles, making the industrial restructuring in East Asia moving slowly and difficultly. All this truth come to the end that the industrial restructuring solely targeting on the economic growth under the catching-up strategy is nearly approching the so-called "limit" state, so East Asia need to adopt new methods to boost its further development. At last, the author raised some suggestions and gave out some measures for reference regarding how to breakthrough this "limit" .