Taiwan’s Increasingly Boxed-in Economy: Economic Performance and Democratization

Taiwan’s economic miracle of the 1950s through the 1980s is certainly coming under challenge as economic growth has slowed while inequality has increased. To some and probably a large extent, this is the inevitable result of the country’s current transformation from an industrial to an “information age” economy. We suggest, however, that some challenges that the country faces can be considered to be the “costs of success” of its past economic miracle. In this paper, we argue that these economic strains result from an “increasingly boxed-in economy” in which previous opportunities for rapid growth have been curtailed. Furthermore, Taiwan’s very successful democratization the late 1980s and early 1990s which has some-times been called a “political miracle” has seemingly exacerbated some of the economic problems.