Flying Geese, Swarming Sparrows or Preying Hawks? Perspectives on East Asian Industrialization

This paper explicates and evaluates three contending explanations of East Asian development by comparing the conceptual and empirical claims of leading proponents of each viewpoint. We label the Japan centered, developmentalist perspective, “flying geese”; the Japan centered, dependency perspective, “preying hawks”; and the state autonomy perspective, “swarming sparrows”. We conclude that the flying geese model best characterizes the pattern of East Asian industrialization at the present time.