Guest editor’s introduction

Export-led growth, through making the best use of comparative advantage, has been the hallmark of the Asian newly-industrializing economies (NIEs). Despite the occasional hiccup, the 1980s were a decade of sustained high-level growth. However, the four high-flyers of Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan have found it difficult to maintain quite the same pace in the 1990s. They are becoming, as Japan earlier became, more mature if potentially less dynamic economies.