NBER WORKING PAPER SERIES THE TYRANNY OF NUMBERS: CONFRONTING THE STATISTICAL REALITIES OF THE EAST ASIAN GROWTH EXPERIENCE Alwyn Young Working Paper No. 4680 NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138 March 1994 This paper was supported by a grant from the MIT-NTU Collaboration Agreement and an NBER Olin Fellowship. I am indebted to Chris Paxson for providing data tapes on Taiwan, to Chan Wing-Kwong, Chao Bi-Tsyr, Ho Kun-Lon, Peter Kisler, John Sharon and Woo Hyun-Sook for help in gathering and entering data, and, most especially, to Ho Veng-Si and Yang Shin-Kyu for extraordinary research assistance Thanks are due the govemments of Hong Kong, South Korea and Taiwan for providing unpublished data and answering queries Special appreciation is due the government of Singapore which, while disagreeing with most of my analysis and all of my conclusions, has generously supplied me with both published and unpublished data on the Singaporean economy. This paper is part of NBER's research programs in Growth and Intemational Trade and Investment. Any opinions expressed are those of the author and not those of the National Bureau of Economic Research