All Shorenstein APARC Multimedia

The Flying Geese Paradigm Version 2.0: The Interactions of Demographic, Economic, and Institutional Dynamics in China, Japan, and Korea

Analyzing official economic and demographic data of China, Japan, and Korea, Aoki identifies the four phases of economic development that these economies have been passing through and are expected to face. Each phase is characterized by a particular pattern of relationships between demographic factors, such as labor participation rates and rural-urban migration on one hand, and economic performances measured by per capita GDP and labor productivity on the other. There is expected to be a remarkable commonality in this demographic-economic dynamic among those economies, stemming from the common historical legacy of monsoon agriculture dominated by small family-managed farms in pre-industrialization time. Together with this commonality, however, there are differences in the timing of transitions from one phase to the next, conditioned by political events and so on, as well as in institutional arrangements facilitating the transitions. Aoki characterizes these patterns of demographic-economic-institutional dynamics as "Flying Geese Paradigm Version 2.0," distinguishing it from the original Flying Geese Paradigm, once popular in the development economics literature, that focused on the historical pattern of technological transfer in Asia from the 1930s to the 1960s. Aoki then goes on to discuss its policy implications in terms of possible strategic complementarities