Cultural Aspects of the Middle-Income Trap

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-539-3_28How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Cultural aspects of MIT; Development Aspiration; Drivers of Development; Middle-Income Trap

Abstract

In the early 1990s, following the rise of the “Four Asian Tigers”, most developing nations were “startled” and sought to “imitate” them to take off as new Newly Industrialized Economies (NIEs). However, to this day, only 34 economies have successfully escaped the Middle-Income Trap (MIT), while 108 other countries are still at risk of falling into it.

Escaping the MIT is a huge challenge that isn’t simply about overcoming economic barriers to optimize growth processes. The paper analyzes how once-poor East Asian nations became NICs (Newly Industrialized Countries). Alongside spectacular economic reasons, there were also cultural reasons, which were perhaps even more spectacular: they revitalized traditional values, awakened a love for learning, a spirit of diligence, and a sense of community responsibility. They focused on education and science and ignited a desire for democracy and a healthy will to develop.

Due to its cultural similarities with the NICs, Vietnam has a burning ambition to “become a dragon”, yet it has not taken off as of 2020 and today.

The cultural reasons for falling into the MIT include: a prejudiced attitude towards the wealthy; insufficiently inclusive development institutions; corruption as a major driver for group interests; a misguided attitude of self-congratulation on achievements; education that chases after empty titles; science that falls into pseudo-problems; and a lack of values like justice, righteousness, democracy, and freedom.

To escape the middle-income trap, if the economic reason is to optimize growth processes and resources, then the cultural reason is to build healthy drivers for development.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Ho Si Quy
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/02/17
TI  - Cultural Aspects of the Middle-Income Trap
BT  - Proceedings of the International Conference on Culture and Humanity in the Era of Rising and Integration (ICDHV 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 418
EP  - 437
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-539-3_28
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-539-3_28
ID  - Quy2026
ER  -