After half a century of success, the Asian tigers must reinvent themselves

THE FOUR Asian tigers—Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan—once fascinated the economic world. From the early 1960s until the 1990s, they regularly achieved double-digit growth. A generation that had toiled as farmers and labourers watched their grandchildren become some of the most educated people on the planet. The tigers started by making cotton shirts, plastic flowers and black wigs. Before long, they were producing memory chips, laptops and equity derivatives. In the process they also spawned a boisterous academic debate about the source of their success. Some attributed it to the anvil of government direction; others to the furnace of competitive markets.