Taiwan has achieved impressive economic development in both the domestic and international arenas. This book examines Taiwan's developmental history and attempts to analyse the reasons for its success. Combining both quantitative and qualitative analysis, the authors look at the country's policy performance in terms of a number of prevalent developmental theories, finally isolating flexibility, foresight and fortuna as the key to Taiwan's effective development. The book combines material that is specific to Taiwan with cross-national theorising. The Taiwanese example is used to test the prevalent formulations of domestic development and international economy--the developmental, dependency, statist and tradeoff theories--and to reach new conclusions. This book will be of interest to second- and third-year undergraduates and to postgraduate students of Asian studies and political economy.