Actually, Sachs' argument is more complicated than this, since he's contrasting the East Asian countries with other developing nations and arguing that, in relative terms, East Asia has an open trade regime. His assumption is that the closer you get to completely free markets, the faster you grow, not that East Asia has found the right balance between markets and intervention.

Oddly, in the 1980s Sachs was much more open to the idea that industrial policy had played an important role in East Asian development. He criticized the "nearly religious belief that a dramatic freeing of markets and reduced government regulations are the keys to rapid and sustained recovery," and cited approvingly the argument that "the Asian experience is not one of an unfettered market economy, but rather one of enlightened policy activism of national governments." All this notwithstanding, Sachs has become the most vociferous critic of the IMF's austerity program for East Asian economies, arguing that the IMF is misdiagnosing the Asian problem as being about fiscal mismanagement on the part of the state, rather than about a speculative credit spiral.