ECOS2025 Tutorial 1
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ECOS2025
Tutorial 1 (Week 1)
In tutorial 1, students will be introduced to the tutor and shown how tutorials will be run over the semester. Students will be formed into a group (team) and remain in the group throughout the semester.
N.B. The questions are not necessarily designed for getting the ‘precisely correct’ answers but are to get acquainted with basic facts and think about some pertinent questions. Hopefully, we will get back to some of these questions at the end of the course, to be able to come up with better informed answers.
Question 1.
East Asian economic growth received a widespread international attention in the 1980s and early 1990s as the World Bank and major news media coined the terms such as the ‘Asian Miracle’ and ‘Four Asian Tigers’ (also known as ‘Four Asian Dragons’) to refer to Asia’s several ‘Newly Industrialized Economies’ . These terms are now outdated but knowing the background is still at the core of Asian growth experiences, now expanded to include other countries in the region (most notably China). Which economies did they mean to comprise the ‘Four Asian Tigers’ and what was special about their growth performance? Do you see any common characteristics in terms of political and economic system, history, geography, and culture among them?
(Seehttps://www.investopedia.com/terms/n/newly-industrialized-country.asp,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Asian_Tigers, or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBQUa9he- cs)
Question 2.
In this unit, we will focus on the following economies to stay up to date and more relevant: in order of lecture sequence, Japan, South Korea, China, and the following ASEAN economies; Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines and Viet Nam. List the countries according to their current living standards as measured by per capita income. Categorize each country into a high-income, middle-income (further split into upper- and lower middle-income countries, MICs) and the low-income group, if any. Use the definition available from the World Bank (https://www.worldbank.org/en/country/mic). For country level data, you might refer to the World Development Indicators available at https://databank.worldbank.org/source/world-development-indicators.
Question 3.
Obtain the data for real GDP per capita in 1965 and 2018, respectively, for China, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Viet Nam (A good data source is https://fred.stlouisfed.org/). List these countries in order of the highest to the lowest in terms of the ratio of real (constant) GDP per capita in 2018 to real (constant) GDP per capita in 1965 (note that for Vietnam the data is available from 1984). Which country showed the highest growth performance and which country showed the lowest over the period? Compare their growth performance against the same measure for Australia from 1965 to 2018. Do you see any catching up (known as ‘convergence’ in economics)?
Question 4.
Based on your previous studies in economics, how useful do you think economics (or economic models) is for understanding the East Asian economic growth experience? Why or why not?
2022-09-15