Five small open economies

Ronald Findlay, Stanislaw Wellisz

In economics, as in biology, small islands can provide illuminating examples of the interactions of internal dynamics and external pressures in a restricted space. This book examines five small open economies - Hong Kong, Singapore, Jamaica, Mauritius, and Malta - and traces how they dealt with the opportunities and challenges of the postcolonial world. Through a comparative study of their social, political, and economic structures and development, the authors attempt to account for differences in the growth performance of these economies over the latter part of the twentieth century. No one path has proved to be a sure road to success. The resource-poor city-states of Hong Kong and Singapore - one with a laissez-faire government, the other more interventionist - have prospered economically while improving their distribution of income. Jamaica, despite its agricultural and mineral...

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