““The “East Asian development model” is an adaptation of the strategy advocated by German economist Friedrich List (1789–1846), which in turn drew inspiration from the “American System” created in the early United States by Alexander Hamilton and Henry Clay. The United States and Bismarck’s Germany (which adopted much of List’s program) were the two most successful “catch-up” economies of the nineteenth century. Japan’s first modernization drive, which turned it from an agrarian feudal state to Asia’s first industrial power in the decades after 1870, more or less copied the German model.17””
