Using the developmental history of Taiwan as a starting point, Flexibility, Foresight and Fortuna critically examines several prevalent formulations of domestic development and international economy. The authors examine Taiwan’s policy performance from, in turn, the developmental, the dependency, the statist, and the trade-off perspectives on political economy. They reject these approaches in favour of the key ideas of flexibility, foresight and fortuna as an explanation of Taiwan’s relatively unusual success in achieving domestic development and upward mobility in the international system.