Pathways to industrial environmental improvement in the East Asian newly industrializing economies

After the adoption of ‘grow first clean up later’ environmental strategies, governments in the East Asian newly industrializing economies (NIEs) turned to environmental ‘clean‐up’ by enacting landmark environmental legislation, creating command and control environmental agencies and promulgating tough air and water emissions standards. Available evidence suggests there is wide variability in the performance of these new environmental regulatory agencies. Most attribute this variability to differences in ‘political will’. However, why have some governments among the East Asian NIEs been able to muster the ‘political will’ to impose duties on industrial polluters while others have not? This paper answers this question by summarizing a larger study (Rock, 2002) which examines the ‘politics of industrial pollution’ control in six East Asian NIEs. Each case study is based on extensive interviews, the collection of data on the effectiveness of pollution management policies, and the integration of both with the political economy literature on each economy.