The Asian Tigers and the Economics Literature .docVIP

Scholarly Journal Articles about the Asian Tiger Economies: Authors, Journals, and Research Fields, 1986-2001 By Joe C. Davis Trinity University San Antonio, TX 78212 jdavis@trinity.edu and Jorge G. Gonzalez Trinity University San Antonio, TX 78212 jorge.gonzalez@trinity.edu May 2002 Scholarly Journal Articles about the Asian Tiger Economies: Authors, Journals, and Research Fields, 1986-2001 I. Introduction. The “Asian Tigers” arrival into the world economy has been extraordinary. Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, and Thailand have experienced dramatic changes over the past 20 years. Their economies have fundamentally changed from traditional agriculturally based societies to rapidly growing newly industrialized nations. Their incredible rates of growth were accompanied by significant structural changes. While most of the change has been positive, from time to time these nations have been rocked by economic “growing pains.” These transformations of the South East Asian economies have attracted considerable attention in popular and scholarly publications. This paper extends bibliometric research into an area neglected thus far: the East Asian economies. It also extends bibliometric research itself in a new direction by investigating how economics literature responds to changes in the underlying economies. There were approximately 4,200 scholarly articles written about the East Asian economies that were indexed by the Journal of Economic Literature from 1986 to 2001 and included on the CD-ROM EconLit. This paper studies the economic literature about each of the major East Asian nations individually and for all of them combined. In addition, the paper presents a Who’s Who of this literature by identifying the leading authors, journals, and research fields. Concentration of articles among journals and authors is also explored in detail. Then the literature trends about the Asian Tiger economies are con