International Political Economy

From the meteoric rise of Japan in the 1970s and the 1980s to the rapid industrialization of the four East Asian “Tiger ” economies and the recent ascendance of emerging giants such as China, the rise of East Asian economies poses as a challenging analytical problem for the field of international political economy. Does this general rise of East Asia follow the necessary pathways of advanced industrialized economies in North America and Western Europe? If so, the rise of East Asia can simply be explained by existing IPE theories. Otherwise, how might the complex unfolding of political economic forces in these East Asian economies inform us something important about existing IPE theories and frameworks? In 2 this chapter, I seek to deal with this analytical challenge by using the diverse development trajectories in East Asian economies to inform the study of IPE. In particular, I argue that the rise of East Asia in the international political economy can provide a fertile research ground for us to “theorize back ” at the dominant discourses in the study of IPE