The expansion of a durable goods market and its increase in popularity, as typically shown in the rapid development of motorization is the result. Japan expanded its domestic market by shifting its major export products from textiles to domestic electrical goods, and enabling a decrease in the sales price by cost reduction through mass-production during the fifties and sixties. We can say that ASEAN countries adopted the same process during the eighties and nineties.
5. Advancing the Industry and Labor Force
Although investment is important to change of industrial structure, and to convert from an agricultural to a manufacturing base, the laborforce plays a large role, in other words labor movement is a reality. The results are shown in the change in employment structure. In Japan, the proportion of agricultural laborers shows a marked change, falling from 33% in 1960 to only 7.6% in 1990, which is less than a quarter, and Thailand, Malaysia and the Philippines also show a large change by halving in the same period. (See Table 5)
Within the employment structure change, as long as the agricultural production increases, absolute reduction in total agricultural workers cannot happen. All countries except Thailand continued to increase, although the percentage increases are less than one percent since the eighties. That is because the non-agricultural sector does not absorb the entire increase in population and laborforce. However, it is a fact that cannot be ignored that agricultural laborers don't settle.
When we look at the percentage population movement between rural and urban areas, the percentage that move from the countryside to the city tends to decrease in the long-term, for example in Japan, it has fallen from 36.8% in 1960 to 20.8% in 1984, a 60% decrease in percentage, and the flow the other way from city to country-side is slowly increasing from 14.9% to 22.2% in the same period. Although agricultural areas supplied work-force to non-agricultural areas by 20% net movement in the sixties which contributed to the conversion
