The 20th century, especially after World War II, represented a milestone for the industrialization, which began to expand across practically the entire planet, including countries with peripheral or underdeveloped economies, which, until then, were purely rural. This set of newly industrialized countries is called NPI, acronym for New Industrialized Countries, and eventually is also represented by NIC (New Industrialized Countries).
The NPIs, or NICs, consolidated their industrialization process from the 1950s onwards. They concentrated around themselves a series of productive activities and became major manufacturing centers for electronic equipment and industrial components. Another aspect was the large presence of foreign investments on them, so that multinational companies, in most cases, began to exert greater weight on this economic transformation that these countries underwent in the period in question.
It is clear that each NPI industrial process presented itself in a specific way. However, among the general characteristics, we can highlight the great technological dependence on developed countries, the accelerated urbanization, the rapid growth of the tertiary sector (commerce and services) and the reorganization of the International Division of the Work. In this orientation, the NPIs started to export industrial products and import more advanced technologies from the developed world.
Initially, the industrialization process of the underdeveloped world took place in Latin America, with emphasis on three countries: Brazil, Mexico and Argentina. These territories are similar in that they have a large consumer market, a high availability of cheap labor, a large amount of raw materials and the development of its infrastructure aimed at attracting companies foreign companies.
The Latin American model of industrialization was import substitution and prioritized the manufacture, mainly, of consumer goods that were previously imported, that is, equipment used for subsequent transformation into goods. This model persisted with the entry of a large number of multinational companies, remaining active until the 1980s, when it entered a crisis. In general, the speed of evolution of industrialization in Latin America occurred at a slower pace compared to other NPIs.
The biggest highlight, in this last aspect, was for the Asian tigers, the name given to the four Asian countries that presented an astonishing pace of industrialization: Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea and Taiwan. These countries developed on the basis of industrialization. export oriented, in a different way, therefore, from the Latin Americans. In other words, the main concern of this industrial model was to serve the international market, both by the foreign companies that settled there (the most of them Japanese) and by national companies, so that some of these have also become large multinationals, with emphasis on Korean women.
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Another important case among newly industrialized countries was that of China, which developed from a planned economic structure, that is, with the full presence of the State in the economy and the self-styled “socialist”. From the 1970s onwards, given the strong crisis that marked the countries that adopted this economic model (including the USSR), the China started to implement greater economic opening, with the receipt of foreign companies and the commercialization International.
The Chinese model of industrialization, still under the strong presence of the State, was consolidated by the establishment of the Zones Special Economics, in which the government directed the infrastructure locations in which foreign companies would establish. Furthermore, in that country, a multinational factory should join a joint venture with a national company, which leveraged the development of the local industry for many decades. China's advantages are its very large consumer market, extremely cheap labor and easy access to raw materials, which made the country one of the largest producers in the world and, so far, with the second largest Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the world.
Finally, among the NPIs, the New Asian Tigers, the result of the expansion of Asian Tigers across Asia and also of investment from the United States and Japan. The new tigers are Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines, which have an even more recent industrial development process. These countries, although they have less professional qualification among their workers, have less spending on wages and labor rights, which makes them attract a large number of companies. In this way, they became large industrial producers, mainly of textile and electronics, although some of them still have economies centered on the agricultural market, such as the Vietnam.
By Me. Rodolfo Alves Pena
