Industrial Restructuring and Early Industry Pathways in the Asian First-Generation NICs: The Singapore Garment Industry

Abstract

The authors aim to contribute to understanding of the industrial dynamics/evolution of mature export production complexes in the first generation Asian newly industrialised countries (NICs), employing an evolutionary economic perspective. Over the past decade and longer, the first-generation Asian NICs, Singapore included, have been confronted with imperatives necessitating deep restructuring. We observe that the pattern of industrial decline associated with failed restructuring caused by lock-in does not fit these countries, industrial regions, and early industries. Yet research has hardly begun to look at adjustment or to address deeper evolution from tenets in the framework of evolutionary economics, although such an approach is made more rather than less relevant by continued resilience. We analyse the pathway(s) of one early industry, the apparel industry in Singapore, through the 1980s and 90s. The withering away in the Singapore context of an industry such as apparel manufacture is not inevitable. From a juxtaposition of the line of thinking in evolutionary economics in which hindrance and decline due to path dependency and lock-ins are emphasised, with an alternative line in which the possibility of adjusting through renewal and the limited operation of lock-ins is emphasised, we discuss why the latter rather than the former has been the case.