Growth Performance
It is simply fascinating to uncover mere facts regarding changes in GDP and its industrial components over time. One may ask in this respect questions such as: When did MEG begin, why, and how? What are the characteristic features of the MEG in the region concerned? Were "long swings"( Abramovitz 1961 ) or "trend acceleration"( Ohkawa and Rosovsky 1973, pp.39-42 ) observable outside of the USA or Japan, respectively? What were the initial conditions of MEG? How does one evaluate the role of the initial conditions in ( or their impacts on ) the country's industrialisation? How about the hypothesis of concurrent growth, as has been found applicable to Japan?
In order to answer questions like these, one needs to accumulate, critically evaluate, and estimate basic statistical information. This process often involves long, tedious work which still requires the sound judgement of a well-trained researcher. A specimen example of such an effort is currently being made in order to come up with a new estimate of manufacturing production and its historical path by taking a new look at the long deserted statistical documents ( Guan 1997; see Figure 1).
An entirely new estimate of GDP of the People's Republic of China has been recently made public jointly by the State Statistical Bureau of the Chinese Government and the COE Project ( 1997 ). By comparing its results with a recent estimate made by Maddison ( 1995, p. 191 ), one may observe that the annual growth rates of GDP in the both estimates are remarkably similar ( Figure 2). There are, however, substantial differences in the rate of growth in the manufacturing sector between the new estimate and that of Wu ( 1997 ). Why the latter difference came about will be a very important subject for future investigation.
Compositions of GDE
Modern economists have inherited many valuable intellectual assets from past generations, including several hypotheses regarding the components of GDE. With regard to personal consumption, for instance, the permanent income hypothesis by Friedman ( 1957 ) still presents an attractive theoretical possibility and may deserve new attempts at checking against new data from the wider Asian region.
On the side of capital formation, one would be curious to find the movements in investment ratio I/Y, inasmuch as investment is the motive power of economic growth. Also highly relevant is a question how capital formation has been financed. Despite a widely-held view that workers in the early stage of economic development do not save much, there seems to be some evidence that this may not be necessarily the case, as Smiles ( 1861 ) reports that as a result of steady growth of workmen's earnings in the nineteenth century England they saved considerable proportions of their incomes.
A very exciting feature of the new SSBC/COE study ( 1997 ), as mentioned above, is that an effort has been made to complete long-term GDE series by revising the old MPS ( material product system ) version of gross expenditures. The estimated results reveal that the investment ratio has continued to grow after 1962, which has in turn been supported by a gradual increase in domestic savings rate (1 - average propensity to consume ). It is interesting to note that both of these expenditure patterns are similar to those of pre-WWII Japan, as reported by Ohkawa and Shinohara ( 1979, pp. 251-53 ) and depicted in Figures 3 and Figures 4.
The role of foreign trade in the early phases of the MEG still warrants an empirical examination; for instance, to see the extent to which it served as a demand-pull factor of economic growth, etc. Related here perhaps is the policy choice between import substitution vs. export promotion. Also, how important was the role of international capital inflow? The Korean path, for instance, was quite different in this regard from that of other nations inclusive of Japan.
Population
No doubt population forms a highly important area of investigation in the ASHSTAT. A study by Takahashi ( 1997 ) of North-eastern Thai villages indicates that there is, contrary to the previously accepted view, apparently a rational mechanism which works in such a way that any unbalances between population and economic well being will be adjusted after some time; in the farming age, the mechanism worked by way of (1) expanding arable land area and (2) making use of off-farm employment possibilities ( e.g. participating in commercial activities, day employment in urban districts, working as unpaid family workers, etc. ). After the beginning of industrialisation, however, the population transition set in; the rise in the cost of raising children, as well as the decline in death rates due to the introduction of modern medicine and improved sanitary conditions, shifted emphasis from quantity to quality in human investment, thus suppressing pressures on birth rates.
Unemployment
Economic development in East Asia seems to have experienced the coexistence of both abundance and shortage of labour. While labour is abundant in villages during the slack season, for instance, there are ample opportunities for the seasonally abundant labour to engage itself in within-the-farm, non-agricultural activities. On the other hand, the agricultural demand for labour regularly repeats seasonal ups and downs. Labour supply is therefore quite abundant in the annual averages, and yet realises more-than-a-full employment status during the peak season ( see Sen 1966 ).
Moreover, one finds historical evidence which suggests that new technologies borrowed from the West have been of labour-augmenting varieties and that this was true in both manufacturing and agriculture ( Odaka 1989 ). Until such time comes as the urban industrial sector is expanded to a sufficiently high scale and efficiency so that the on-farm, non-agricultural production activities are defeated and disappear, and hence their employment absorption capabilities disappear, the economy abounds with ample supplies of labour, although the latter do not make their existence felt in the market by way of ( for instance ) rising unemployment. Under such circumstances, it may be possible that gradual increases in real per capita household income have coexisted with the stagnancy in real earnings of common wage labour.
With the above considerations in mind, the recent findings from the Thai labour market seem quite striking. First, from an examination of the labour force survey in post-WWII, one may conclude that the Thai notion of the "unemployment" could very well be multiple, and is possibly divergent from that of the Western usage. Second, assuming for the moment that the basic statistical survey was consistently made with reasonable accuracy, one observes a drastic upward movement in the unemployment rate after 1980 ( cited by Suehiro, pp. 72-73; see Figure 5 )(5). This phenomenal increase may have been caused by a structural transformation which took place in the Thai society in the 1970s, and that therefore redundant labour resources could no longer be contained in "disguised" fashion in the 1980s and onward. The phenomenon may partly be ascribable to the very rapid urbanisation of the economy, which has attracted swarms of job seekers into the urban areas ( especially the Bangkok region ). In any case, the emergence of such a substantial size of visible unemployment is quite a contrasting feature as compared with that of ( say ) Japanese industrialisation even up to the 1990s. This of course leads one to the question: why the difference, if any?
Real Wages
What was the general trend of real wages during the process of industrialisation? It is by now common understanding that it did go up during the British Industrial Revolution, as suggested many years ago by Ashton ( 1949 ), despite the old controversy regarding the thesis of the immiseration of the working class ( e.g. Kucynski 1942-46 ).
If the above is the state of art today, why is it that real wages in the non-agricultural sector kept declining in the Philippines during the Macros and even through the Aquino regimes, despite a slow, yet steady increase in real per capita income? Are the basic figures consistent? If not, why not?
One may speculate in this regard that in the period shortly before and after the beginning of industrialisation, real wages may be held more or less constant. Such, in fact, was the case in Japan during the second half of the nineteenth century ( Saito 1996 ). The statistical records of the West also reveal that the levels of real wages went upward only at a very modest speed ( if at all ) for about half a century after 1820 ( Mitchell 1975, pp. 71-72 and 388-90; see Figure 6). An important side story, often concealed from statistics, is that wage earners in old days may have been entitled to some non-pecuniary compensations.(6) Moreover, the records of money wages may have registered only institutionally guaranteed minimum levels, which were updated only with long time lags. Taking these and other circumstances into consideration, it may become possible to resolve the Filipino puzzle.
Technological Change in Manufacturing
Technological progress has been a favourite subject of economists and economic historians. Whereas macro statistics do not supply sufficient information as to the exact nature of changes in production technology and of innovation processes, they nonetheless record the de facto locus of such changes and their impacts on the structure of the economy. For this purpose, concepts like labour productivity ( Y/L ) and capital intensity ( K/L ) play a very important role ( where L stands for labour input ). Normally one expects to find that higher levels of Y/L is accompanied by ever-rising values of K/L. It is surprising and quite perplexing, therefore, for one to find that the growth of the former in Thailand went hand in hand with a declining ( albeit at a slow rate ) trend of the former over a substantially long period after WWII ( Shintani 1993, pp. 200, 204, 206; see Figure 7). How does one interpret such a finding as this? Does he/she ascribe it to mere statistical fallacy, or judge it to reflect some reality in the economy? If so, why? If not, why not?