Master the economics behind Asia's rise

If you've spent time reading about Asian economic development — the miracle, the tigers, the 'China model' — you've probably noticed that the popular accounts rarely satisfy. They flatten decades of deliberate, contested, often fragile policymaking into a single triumphant arc. And if you work in policy, research, or international affairs, you already know how much that matters: the gap between the narrative and the actual causal mechanism is exactly where bad policy gets made.

That's the gap this school is built to close.

I designed Asian Development Edge for the people who want to move beyond the headline and into the machinery. That means starting where good analysis starts — with theory and measurement. What does development actually mean, and how do we read the data we use to track it? From there, we go deep into the cases that matter: the structural differences between South Korea's chaebol-centered industrial policy and Taiwan's SME-network capitalism; Singapore's FDI strategy and what the city-state model actually requires to function; Vietnam's Doi Moi reforms and why they produced a manufacturing surge rather than the stagnation that followed similar openings elsewhere. We spend real time on infrastructure, export orientation, human capital formation, and innovation ecosystems — not as buzzwords, but as policy levers with specific mechanisms, specific tradeoffs, and specific evidence behind them.

I want to be direct about what this school asks of you. The material is analytically demanding. We read primary sources — IMF reports, World Bank indicators, national development plans — and we read them critically, the way a development economist would. We distinguish between correlation and causation. We name the institutional bottlenecks that explain why some countries stall in the middle-income trap while others leapfrog via mobile finance or digital infrastructure. We take the hard questions seriously: Is the developmental state actually replicable? What does US–China geopolitical competition mean for the next generation of Asian growth? Can the lessons from Shenzhen or Subic Bay translate to sub-Saharan Africa where I worked as an advisor to The African Capacity Building Foundation?

The capstone brings it all together. You'll design a development strategy — from evidence to policy recommendation — the kind of exercise that separates someone who has studied development from someone who can practice it. If that's the level you want to work at, this school is built for you. I'd be glad to have you in the seminar room.