Asia

Most Asian countries have emerged as sovereign states after varying periods of colonial rule, with the result that their legal frame-work, administrative system and other modern institutions bear the strong impress of the colonial power. In most of the countries, the industrializing élite was of non-indigenous origin, which probably accounts for the general scarcity of dynamic entrepreneurs which persists in Asian countries even today. Those countries which did not undergo a period of colonial occupation show marked traces of their feudal or pre-capitalist order (A. 10, 13, 14, 33, 37, 52). A number of studies (A. 13, 14) deal with the wide impact of national independence and social reform movements. All those developments had a significant bearing on the pattern of institutions and alignment of forces in the emergent nations (A. 5, 13, 14, 52), hence on the evolution of labour relations systems.