How Asia Works: Success and Failure in the World’s Most Dynamic Region. By Joe Studwell. Grove; 366 pages; $27. Profile; £14.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

IN 1989 John Williamson, a British economist in Washington, DC, listed ten economic policies that enjoyed the backing of the IMF, the World Bank and many of their clients in Latin America. Whatever the merits of these policies, the “Washington consensus”, as he called it, proved badly named. Its prescriptions—stabilise, privatise and liberalise—have caused no end of controversy. Almost 25 years later, they get another drubbing in Joe Studwell’s provocative new book, “How Asia Works”.

But Mr Studwell’s own manifesto for economic success does resemble the Washington consensus in one respect: it holds that poor economies can prosper by following a short recipe of tried and tested policies. This is now an unfashionable approach among economists, who have turned their attention from policies to “institutions”: the social and political constraints that weigh on ministers, whatever policies they avow. Most authors shy away from prescriptions for success, arguing that every development dish is different.

Mr Studwell has no such inhibitions. Asia’s post-war miracle economies emerged, he argues, by following a recipe with just three ingredients: land reform; export-led, state-backed manufacturing; and financial repression.

The process began with the ousting of the landlords. Feudal estates were broken up and divided among small farmers, who also received cheap credit and valuable advice. Smallholder farming requires “grotesque” amounts of labour, Mr Studwell concedes. But that is a good thing, because countries as poor as Taiwan or South Korea were in the 1950s have labour—and only labour—in abundance.

Tightly planted, closely tended farms coax the best yields out of each parcel of land. This rural bounty then creates room for the next step: export-led manufacturing. The state, Mr Studwell argues, must nurse manufacturers through their infancy, helping them to learn how to stand on their own feet. This nurture should, however, be combined with discipline: the state must oblige firms to export. Foreign sales provide an external test of their progress, allowing the state to “cull losers”, even if it cannot pick winners.

The final secret of Asian success, Mr Studwell argues, was a cowed financial system. Captive savers, penned in by capital controls, were ripped off by the banks, which paid low interest rates. This allowed the banks to subsidise industrial firms through their years of education.

Mr Studwell’s recipe is not original: the formula dates back at least 140 years, he shows, to Japan under the Meiji emperor. Only the first step, smallholder farming, would be backed by this newspaper. But “How Asia Works” is a striking and enlightening book, which reflects the author’s unusual career. Having worked as an analyst (for the Economist Intelligence Unit, our sister company) and a consultant, he wrote books on China’s seduction of foreign businessmen and Asia’s crony capitalists. Then he went back to school, embarking on a doctorate at Cambridge, home to a number of unorthodox economists.

The result is a lively mix of scholarship, reporting and polemic. Its heart is a historical account of how smallholder farming, export-led manufacturing and financial repression took root in Asia’s miracle economies, such as Japan and Taiwan, but failed to bed down in the Philippines and Indonesia. This is punctuated by travelogues, describing Asia’s landscape of economic triumph and tribulation, from the kitsch houses of rice farmers in Japan’s Niigata prefecture, who have great agricultural know-how but little architectural taste, to the unfinished towers of Jakarta’s Bank Alley, their growth stunted by the Asian financial crisis.

The most impressive part of the book is the 68 pages of footnotes in which Mr Studwell dips into his trove of reading and reporting. He includes observations on Javanese chickens, the sex life of a Korean chaebol-founder, the constitutional rules that Meiji-era Japan copied from Prussia and his exchanges with Mahathir Mohamad, Malaysia’s former strongman.

In these notes, Mr Studwell wanders into the weeds of development (quite literally: Japanese rice is weeded nine times a year, he writes). But he never gets lost. The three-step doctrine he advocates is even shorter than the ten-step Washington consensus he opposes. But it will no doubt prove similarly controversial.