After the Crisis: Capital and Regime Resilience in the ASEAN Three

Abstract

A decade after the Asian financial and economic crisis, assessments can be made about the varying capacities of different political regimes to withstand economic shocks. This paper shows that Malaysia's hybrid approach to authoritarianism has been most resilient, Indonesia's harder authoritarian rule was most brittle, and Thailand's democratic politics displayed an intermediate level of sturdiness, hence delaying – but not preventing – their breakdown. However, this paper argues also that in trying to explain these varying amounts of resilience, it is not enough to examine the institutions and procedures of which regimes are composed. Instead, in taking a political economy approach, attention is given to prior patterns of capital ownership involving the state, indigenous tycoons, ethnic Chinese entrepreneurs and foreign investors.