The big push, industrialization and international trade: The role of exports

This paper analyzes the “late” industrializations of South Korea and Taiwan, and how they can be produced by an export promotion policy. The paper adopts an open economy version of the well-known big push model. Thus, it recovers neoclassical accounts of industrialization through exports, complementing previous literature, which tends to show the existence of the big push, but is scarce on trade mechanisms to produce it. The model fits well with some stylized facts of the industrializations in East and Southeast Asia. I also apply it to a comparison of the education policies of East Asia and Latin America.