1The Transition in Open Dualistic Economies in Southeast Asia: Another Look at the Evidence Paper prepared for Panel 31, XIV International Economic History Congress

The open dualistic framework The twenty five years or so from 1950 to 1975 can perhaps be viewed as the “years of high theory ” in development economics when many of the theoretical approaches still in wide use were first put forward. Because so many underdeveloped economies in Asia and Africa had been former colonies, and because many leaders in the newly independent nations tended to blame colonialism for their underdeveloped status, there was considerable scholarly interest in the characteristics of colonial economies which might have retarded processes of economic growth and structural change. One analytical framework which gained some attention in the Asian context was that of the open dualistic colonial economy, developed by Hicks and McNicoll (1971) in their study of the Philippines, and Paauw and Fei (1973) who examined the economic transition from colonial to post-colonial economies in Taiwan, the Philippines, Malaysia and Thailand. The Paauw-Fei framework was also used by Ho (1984: 380-86) to analyse the impact of Japanese colonialism in Taiwan and Korea. In developing the open dualistic model, these scholars drew on the work of Lewis, Myint, Hirschman, Baran, Caves and Baldwin, among others, and also on a number of empirical studies of economic development in East and Southeas