China & World Economy / 26–50, Vol. 28, No. 4, 2020

Seventy Years of Economic Development:
A Review from the Angle of New Structural Economics Justin

Yifu Lin, Yan Wang

Abstract

This review paper provides a new narrative by combing through the experiences of structural transformation among developing countries and discussing the roles of government and market in different contexts. Country performance has been influenced by the prevailing development thinking: the structuralism in the 1950s–1970s, which stresses an active government’s role to overcome market failures for industrialization, and the neoliberalism in the 1980s–present, which advocates for eliminating government failures to build up a well-functioning market. We find that almost all countries failing by following structuralism in their industrialization and neoliberalism in their transition to a market economy, and the few countries successful in catching up have a few characteristics that go against the prevailing structuralism and neoliberalism. The new structural economics, generated from the experiences of successful East Asian economies and proposing active facilitating roles of government in a market economy to remove market failures, will gain traction and take root.