Singapore EDB export industrialisation, 1961

Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew era growth takeoff from 1965 to 1990 was not a small city-state accounting artifact: real GDP per capita grew rapidly, the level multiplied several-fold, investment rates stayed high, and the 1990 income level exceeded regional market-economy peers by a large margin.

Singapore's LKY-era industrial strategy worked through disciplined openness to foreign capital and manufacturing upgrading: FDI inflows were persistently high, FDI intensity exceeded regional peers, manufacturing value added rose sharply, and manufactured exports dominated by 1990.

Estonia adopted among the most radical market-liberalisation packages of any post-Soviet state — flat tax (26% universal rate, 1994), currency board (EEK pegged to DM/EUR, 1992), rapid privatisation, unilateral free trade, and minimal capital controls — and by 2007 had recovered to Soviet-era GDP per capita levels and substantially exceeded them, while Belarusian and Ukrainian peers had not recovered comparably.

East Asian high-performing economies (South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong) achieved superior long-run total factor productivity and manufacturing productivity growth because export-market discipline forced competitive efficiency and technology upgrading, whereas economies that relied on protected domestic industrial policy without rigorous export exposure (Malaysia, Thailand in select sectors) experienced weaker long-run productivity.

Vietnam's post-Doi Moi economic growth (1986-2020) is more strongly associated with private-sector enterprise entry, trade openness, and market-oriented reforms than with state-owned-enterprise (SOE) expansion or continued state direction.

Canada’s long-run prosperity after the Canada–US Free Trade Agreement (1988) and NAFTA (1994) is more associated with market openness than with national industrial-policy initiatives.

Singapore's long-run prosperity and frontier convergence are better predicted by extreme trade openness, strong rule of law, competitive product and services markets, and high economic freedom than by state ownership or industrial targeting alone.

In a panel of middle-income countries 1990-2020, export complexity (Hausmann-Hidalgo Economic Complexity Index) rises more following reforms that improve foreign market access and reduce domestic entry barriers than following expansions of subsidy-only industrial policy.

Lula third-term's Nova Indústria Brasil 2024 industrial-policy package, conditioned on export performance and technology-diffusion metrics, produces measurable sectoral capability gains (semiconductors, green hydrogen, health-industrial complex) by 2030 — replicating the East Asian export-discipline conditionality pattern rather than the earlier Latin American import-substitution-industrialisation pattern.

Across emerging-market and developing economies 1990-2020, higher expropriation risk — measured by ICRG expropriation risk index, Heritage investment-freedom score, and political-risk ratings — predicts shorter investment horizons (higher share of short-term investment, lower share of structures and machinery) and lower capital intensity in tradable sectors.