Development, Urbanization, Migration, and Quality of Life - Dragons and Tigers: A Geography of South, East and Southeast Asia - page 89

rural origins living in cities (see the section on urban-
ization below).
Corruption in poor countries can mean the differ-
ence between life and death because it means that money
that is supposed to be used to improve people' is lives is
going into the pockets of business tycoons and govern-
ment officials. High levels of corruption and poverty
plague countries and regions around the world.
T Transparency International assesses levels of corrup-
tion in business and government. It employs the Corrup-
tion Perception Index (CPI) to rank 180 countries. The
CPI rates a country on a 0-10 scale with 10 being the
least corrupt. As of 2008, Denmark ranked number 1
with a CPI of 9.3. Japan and the United States tie for
number 18 with CPIs of 7.3. Note that 13 countries in
Asia fall into the lower half of the rankings. Myanmar
(Burma), for instance, with its CPI of 1.3 is almost at the
bottom of the list at number 178.

decline and an export surplus is created. Subsequently , ex-
portsand production begin to decline. As domestic costs
increase, industry looks elsewhere and becomes a net im-
porter again. Industries are thereby cycled in an orderly
fashion, akin to the structured pattern of flying geese.
Over time, industries rise and fall, with the old being re-
placed by the new . A country that produced textiles in
the 1920s might have focused on steel in the 1940s,
chemicals in the 1960s, and automobiles in the 1980s.
Each industry is increasingly sophisticated and techno-
logically complex, illustrating the development process.
The “flying geese” analogy can also be applied to a
sequence of countries as each flows along its flight path
of industrial development. For example, in the 1950s, a
labor-intensive manufacturing focus (textiles) character-
ized Japan as a NIC. This has been replaced by capital-
intensive machine industries to the extent that Japan was
classified as an industrialized country in the 1980s. From
an international perspective, the “geese” of moderniza-
tion are seen flying from more developed countries to
less developed ones. At the same time, a sophisticated di-
vision of labor emerges among Asia-Pacific nations.
The 1990s witnessed criticism of the flying geese
model of development. Perhaps applicable in the past
with its vision of Japan leading the Asian flock down the
road of progress, the model overemphasizes Japan' s role
and underplays that of the United States as an export
market for Asian goods. Further, it does not account for
the fact that imports might be from one' s own interna-
tional subsidiaries or joint ventures, or exports might be
dominated by primary (non-manufactured) products.
Through the latter part of the twentieth century , sev-
eral schools of thought prevailed. For example, develop-
ment trajectory proponents purported that all nations
could proceed along an evolutionary path of economic
advancement according to progressive stages already ex-
perienced in the West. Marxists stressed the ills of capital-
ism and class exploitation and the need to alter unequal
power relationships within and between nations.
Another criticism rests on the fact that industries do
not pass in toto from one country to another in a linear pat-
tern. Rather, change is manifested through subsector spe-
cialization. Each time a new technology is commercialized,
a new pattern of clustered economies and division of labor
will appear. Furthermore, postmodern-era production is
interdependent, at once concentrated and dispersed across
hierarchies transcending multiple borders. According to
economists Mitchell Bernard and John Ravenhill (1995),
firms no longer simply seek comparative advantage in loca-
tion relative to raw materials or labor force for an entire
production process. They assign location in terms of “the

SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT ON DEVELOPMENT
Assessment of a combination of development factors can
used to position a country on a perceived continuum of
socioeconomic development. This development spec-
trum is based on misleading pairs of opposites, such as
less developed or more developed, overdeveloped or un-
derdeveloped, and rich or poor. Geographers commonly
use the relative terms developed and developing to indi-
cate relatively rich or relatively poor countries.
After the rise of communism in Russia and China,
development experts assigned countries ideologically
based designations. T Technologically developed, demo-
cratic nations formed the First W orld, the communist-
bloc nations were called the Second W orld, and the
remainder became the Third W orld. When the Soviet
Union collapsed and China began adopting aspects of
capitalism, and poorer countries such as Malaysia
emerged as Economic Tigers, these assignations became
obsolete. Nevertheless, you will still hear the term “Third
World” being used by some people.
The flying geese model , developed by a Japanese
economist in the 1930s, was used in the 1960s to de-
scribe industrial life cycles in recently industrialized na-
tions. Industry- and setting-specific at first, the model
was advanced to examine changing industrial structures
and international shifts in location.
According to the model, an industry starts with a
product import or technology transfer from an industri-
alized nation. An imitation is domestically produced and
substitutes for the original product import. As domestic
production exceeds domestic consumption, imports