Asia's transformation into the world's most dynamic economic region has been a defining development of our time. The pace and scale of its rise have been nothing short of staggering.
That's the story according to Julia Gillard's white paper on the Asian century, and it's right.
"Over the past 20 years, one third of the world's population has re-engaged with the global economy and more are set to do so," the paper says. "Living standards for billions of people in Asia have improved at a rate not previously experienced in human history."
Just between 2000 and 2006, about a million people were lifted out of poverty every week in East Asia alone, we're told.
Japan, South Korea, Singapore and, more recently, China and India doubled their income per person within a decade. Some went on to repeat this achievement two or three times.
By contrast, it took Britain more than 50 years to double its income per person during the Industrial Revolution of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
Why so long? Because the Industrial Revolution was driven by the invention of new technology and it took a while for new inventions to come along and for their use to spread through the economy.
These days, the economy sitting at this "technological frontier" is the US. In principle, the fastest pace at which America's income per person - its material standard of living - can grow is determined by the pace of what today we call "innovation". And that's not fast - say, 2 per cent a year.
So with the rise of Asia we're seeing a phenomenon economists call "catch-up and convergence". Because all the improved machines and better ways of doing things have already been invented and are sitting on the shelf, so to speak, it's not hard for all the countries well back from the technological frontier to catch up with the leader by employing the new productivity-boosting technology. As they do, their standard of living converges on the leading economy's.
This is what happened in the West in the first 30 years or so after World War II. The economies of Europe (and Japan) grew very strongly and closed most of the gap between their living standards and America's.
Now that process of catch-up - and the global spread of the latest technology - has shifted from the developed countries to the developing countries. Japan was the first, followed by South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan, with China getting going in the 1980s and India in the 1990s. More will follow.
Of course, transforming your economy from developing to developed can't be as simple as taking new technology off the shelf, otherwise all the poor countries of the world would be growing as fast as Asia is.
So how have the Asians done it? What have they got right that the others haven't?
The various countries' success hasn't followed a simple recipe, the paper says, but some common patterns have emerged in recent decades.
Many economists explain Asia's rise mainly in terms of its switch from the post-war policy of "import replacement" (seeking to grow by protecting your industries from competition with imports) to export-led growth.
If, as part of this, you allow foreign multinational corporations to set up factories in your country, they bring in the capital need to pay for building those factories, as well as access to the latest foreign technology and the knowledge of how to use it, which ends up being transferred to local technicians and managers and spreading to local firms.
But that's not how the white paper tells it. "Nearly all the high-performing Asian economies deliberately set out to support prosperity by investing in people, building capital and undertaking institutional change, including expanding the role of markets," it says.
Asia's young people enjoyed marked improvements in their access to education and its quality as governments invested in their youthful populations and dramatically transformed their education and training systems.
"With the benefits of a good education and employment-creating reforms, large numbers of young people have become productively employed as they reached prime working age."
Open global trading systems (created by the successive rounds of multilateral reductions in protection under the predecessor to the World Trade Organisation, to whose trade-promoting rules China signed up in 2001) and the construction of vital infrastructure to reduce transport costs have been drivers of integration between Asia and the rich economies, but also between the Asian economies themselves.
Intricate regional production networks have emerged, along with increased flows of "intermediate goods" (components) between countries in the region. Specialisation within the region, and the consequent economies of scale, have given the region a powerful advantage, particularly in manufactures.
Here's a point that ought to be obvious to older Australians - since they've been able to observe it over their lifetimes - but too few people understand: Asia's most successful economies have continually evolved.
"As incomes have risen in population-dense economies such as Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, and as their labour-intensive activities have become less competitive, Asia's high performers have refocused their production on new areas of consumer demand - developing domestic markets and specialising in high-skill activities."
What oldies should have noticed is the way, over the years, the production of simple, labour-intensive goods - such as clothing, footwear and toys - has migrated from one country to another.
Why? Because, contrary to the propaganda of the unions and the Left, Asian workers get their cut from being exploited by wicked "transnational corporations".
As countries' economies grow, workers' real wages rise.
As well, a fair bit of the prosperity is ploughed back into raising the education level of the workforce.
Eventually, the workers' labour gets too expensive to continue using them to produce simple labour-intensive goods, so production of such goods shifts to the next, undeveloped Asian country.
In the first country, production shifts to using the more-skilled workforce to make more sophisticated manufactures. As well, more of the country's production shifts from export to being bought by the now-more-prosperous locals.
The white paper predicts, as this evolutionary process continues, within 13 years - 2025 - China will be the world's biggest economy, India will be third, Japan forth and Indonesia 10th. China will account for a quarter of gross world product and Asia for almost half.
