How Asia Works

The overall result is an initial productive surplus that primes demand for goods and services.

The first intervention – and the most overlooked – is to maximise output from agriculture, which employs the vast majority of people in poor countries. Successful east Asian states have shown that the way to do this is to restructure agriculture as highly labour-intensive household farming

The second intervention – in many respects, a second ‘stage’ – is to direct investment and entrepreneurs towards manufacturing. This is because manufacturing industry makes the most effective use of the limited productive skills of the workforce of a developing economy, as workers begin to migrate out of agriculture. Relatively unskilled labourers