Developmental, Ersatz, Rapacious, or Mixed? Conceptualizing Regime Types in Asia

Abstract

Developmental, Ersatz, Rapacious, or Mixed?Conceptualizing Regime Types in Asia Thomas Pepinsky (bio) In A Region of Regimes: Prosperity and Plunder in the Asia-Pacific, T.J. Pempel, one of the world's foremost experts on the political economy of East Asia, sets out to explain the divergent trajectories of the major countries of East and Southeast Asia since the end of World War II. The general story is well-known. Japan recovered from the war's devastation in short order and became a global economic powerhouse by the 1980s. Although Japan's growth has slowed since the roaring 1980s, as an economic dynamo it has been joined by South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore, which together are some of the most prosperous economies in the world today. Over this same postwar time span, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand have enjoyed decades of steady growth—albeit with some interruptions—and are today solidly middle-income countries. These development "miracles" (to use the terminology of the World Bank in the 1990s) have been overshadowed in the past twenty years by China, which has grown at a remarkable pace after decades of stagnation under Mao Zedong.1 And amid all of this prosperity, there are also cases of more modest economic growth, such as in the Philippines, as well as sheer economic catastrophe, such as in Myanmar and North Korea. Less well-understood are the politics behind these developmental miracles and debacles. Through the 1990s, much was written about the political foundations of economic performance, and several important works adopted a comparative perspective on the region's performance. Pempel himself played an important role in this research. But "big" arguments about economic performance and its political foundations across Asia have been somewhat displaced in the political economy literature by within-country research that probes mechanisms instead of macrostructures. This is the emerging hole in the literature on Asian political economy that A Region of Regimes fills. [End Page 181] Pempel's approach is synthetic and typological, exploring the interrelationships among political institutions, economic policy, and each country's international position. There is a wealth of empirical detail to cover, and the book's major contribution is to organize this material to identify three distinct development models that characterize the region's economies. Developmental regimes (such as Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan) are those with strong, meritocratic, and semi-autonomous bureaucracies that have tight links to the business community and which benefit from a supportive international environment. Ersatz regimes (such as Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand) are those in which the bureaucracy is less autonomous from sociopolitical forces and that possess a fragmented business community but a fundamentally open (if dependent) economy. And rapacious regimes (such as North Korea, Myanmar, and the Philippines) have weak bureaucracies and weak business environments. China is its own regime type, mixing various elements of the other three. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. GDP per Capita, 1945–2020 Source: Jutta Bolt and Jan Luiten van Zanden, Maddison Project Database, 2020 ≈ https://www.rug.nl/ggdc/historicaldevelopment/maddison/research. It can be helpful to look at the empirical record of economic development across these regimes. Figure 1 plots real GDP per capita for [End Page 182] the economies that Pempel covers from 1945 (or the year first available) until now. Just looking at material economic performance, we can see clear differences between the developmental and ersatz regimes. The rapacious regimes are more of a mixed bag though—the Philippines does not look very different from Indonesia, and Myanmar and North Korea stand out for their stagnant growth in the early independence period (Myanmar) and today (North Korea). The heterogeneity among the rapacious regimes is evident if we look at tertiary education completion rates (Figure 2) or total trade as percentage of GDP (Figure 3). Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Tertiary Education Completion Rates, 1945–2020 Source: Robert J. Barro and Jong Wha Lee, "A New Data Set of Educational Attainment in the World, 1950–2010," Journal of Development Economics 104 (2013): 184–98. Note: Data for North Korea was not available. These simple quantitative summaries of these regimes' economic trajectories do not do justice...