Asian Political Economy Research Articles

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

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...

Globalization and the political economy of Asia

In the third millennium, the rebalancing between the West and the East has been evolving steadily. Not only demographically but also in terms of gross national product, foreign trade and weapons accumulation, Asia’s stride has been phenomenal. Underlying these changes are technological advances in the communications and manufacturing industries. This review article summarizes and reflects on some of the latest books in Asian political economy and argues for the need to probe more microscopically into the Asian domestic political economy from a comparative perspective.

The EU’s Connectivity Strategy Towards ASEAN: Is a ‘European Way’ Feasible?

Connectivity is a new key concept in the European Union (EU)’s economic diplomacy towards Asia. In addition to infrastructure of all sorts, it comprises digital, economic regulatory and societal connectivity. The EU Commission promotes a ‘European way’ in its new Asia strategy, which emphasizes a sustainable, comprehensive and international rule-based approach. The connectivity strategy is not least an answer to China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), an enormous unregulated Eurasian infrastructure diplomacy project that has enabled China to become perceived as the EU’s systemic rival. This article analyses these three ‘European way’ dimensions to explore the potential of the connectivity strategy regarding the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN). While ASEAN governments have become more cautious about China’s BRI, they also represent uneasy partners for the EU’s high-standards connectivity strategy. Leaning on the concept of hybrid interregionalism, this article argues that for a ‘European Way’ to emerge, the EU must coordinate its policies with key actors both within and as regards ASEAN, and especially with governments that share similar values, agreements and concerns regarding the BRI in the East Asian political economy.

Transnational Asia and Regional Networks: Toward a New Political Economy of East Asia

This article aims to examine the dynamics of the East Asian political economy and the new regional environments over the past two decades. It puts forth two main propositions. First, the predominant nation–state framework in analyzing the political economy of the East Asian region, while remaining indispensable in its own right, has become inadequate to interpret the profound transformations resultant from heightened pace of cross-border movements of people, practices, ideas and capital. The geo-cultural concept of “Transnational Asia” is proposed as an alternative devise to fill in the gap neglected by the mainstream nation–state-oriented literature. Second, by going beyond the conventional state–society dichotomy and the rigid theoretical divide between statism and institutionalism, I argue that transnational network and regional governance serve as bridges to these divides and as useful analytical tools in deciphering the new dynamics of the East Asian political economy. In its extensive and multilayered interactions with transnational networks, the developmental state has been increasingly supplemented by the networked state which operates both within and without the nation–state boundaries through a variety of interconnected mechanisms.

The ‘diaspora advantage’ of Pauline Chan (1956–): from multicultural filmmaker to cultural broker

ABSTRACTThis is the first academic paper to critically introduce and document the 30-year screen career of Pauline Chan, Australia’s highest profile Chinese film director, television actress and media producer. Sydney-based, Vietnam-born, Hong Kong-educated and US-trained, Chan has directed six films, starred in 14 and produced four television series and films. Despite her prolific career, there has been no sustained research on her profile and repertoire. This paper evaluates the evolution of Chan’s career using the diaspora ‘advantage’ as a new approach. Characterised by mobility rather than culturalism, the term refers to the benefits brought by and skills of diaspora groups that have allowed them to flourish as transnational actors able to leverage resources in both their countries of origin and settlement. It begins by elaborating how Chan’s diaspora advantage has allowed her to challenge welfare multiculturalism and extend aesthetic multiculturalism. It further documents her transition from a multicultural filmmaker to a cultural intermediary by leveraging her diasporic advantage across the film sectors in China and Australia, and opening up new industrial routes outside of the confines of policy. Using interdisciplinary methods to screen biography that include interviews with the filmmaker, film archival research, critical cultural policy studies, and studies in Asian Australian cinema and political economy, this paper argues that the new approach of the diaspora advantage turns the deficit associated with the diaspora into a dividend that has the potential to rethink the imaginary between Asia and Australia.

Big government sentiment and support for protectionism in East Asia

While previous studies find that individual preferences for trade policies are shaped by economic and non-economic factors, it is still unclear whether people’s perception of their government’s role in citizens’ lives affects their attitudes toward free trade. In view of the “developmental state” legacy in East Asia, I investigate how the “big government sentiment” in East Asians’ mindset is associated with their support for protectionism. Based on the data of the third-wave Asian Barometer Survey conducted during 2010 and 2012, I find that when people think that government should bear a major responsibility for the wellbeing of its people, they are more supportive of protectionist policies. This finding contributes to studies of East Asian political economy as well as the formation of individual trade policy preference.

Resilience and the population history of the Kuril Islands, Northwest Pacific: A study in complex human ecodynamics

Living in remote places can strain the adaptive capacities of human settlers. It can also protect communities from external social, political and economic forces. In this paper, we present an archaeological population history of the Kuril Islands. This string of small volcanic islands on the margins of the Northwest Pacific was occupied by maritime hunting, fishing and gathering communities from the mid-Holocene to recent centuries. We bring together (1) 380 new and previously published archaeological radiocarbon dates, (2) a new paleodemographic model based on a radiocarbon-timestamped temporal frequency distribution of archaeological deposits, (3) recently published paleoclimate trends, and (4) recently published archaeological proxy evidence for changes in the extent of social networks. We demonstrate that, over the last two millennia, inhabitants of the Kuril Islands underwent dramatic demographic fluctuations. Explanations of these fluctuations are considered in the context of environmental hazards, social networks and the emergence of an East Asian “World System”, elucidating the tension between local and external adaptive strategies to social and ecological uncertainty. Results suggest that population resilience to local climate and environmental variability was achieved by virtue of social networks that maintained non-local support in times of crisis. Conversely, the expansion of the East Asian political economy into neighboring regions of the southern margin of the Kuril Islands perhaps in conjunction with exposure to epidemic diseases appears to have undermined the adaptive strategies, resulting in an increase in the vulnerability of Kuril populations to environmental fluctuations.

State formation and the evolution of naval strategies in the Melaka Straits, c. 500–1500 CE

The Strait of Melaka and connected waterways have been critical to, and directly affected, the formation of littoral states, societies and economies in eastern Sumatra, the Riau Islands, the Malay Peninsula, and Singapore. The history and nature of statehood in the region is interrelated to the way in which naval capabilities evolved, but, as argued in this article, perhaps not in the straightforward fashion often assumed. Naval capabilities and strategies evolved in tandem with state policy to adapt to changes in the wider Asian maritime political economy which was dominated at various times by China and India. This article examines the factors that affected maritime policy in the Melaka Straits c. 500 to 1500 CE, and the extent to which these furthered the viability of the mainly Malay port-polities, and in particular the regional hegemonic state of Srivijaya in eastern Sumatra. The study utilises textual records, epigraphic materials, and literature to reconstruct a more nuanced picture of maritime states and naval power in premodern Southeast Asia.

New capitalist processes, interdependence and the Asia–US private equity relationship

Private equity has had a short but eventful history in East Asia, characterized first by US firm dominance and then by a nationalistic backlash. This article charts these earlier patterns, but argues that significant developments have taken place since the early 2000s, which have strengthened the position of private equity capital in the Asian political economy. As private equity deal-making has returned to Asia, new linkages have been formed between US private equity funds and local private equity players. Of particular importance have been US–Asian joint ventures, Asian nationals returning to domestic firms from US private equity houses and supportive local elites in the banking and pension fund sectors. The significance is two-fold. First, the spread of private equity has been founded on interdependent relationships between US actors and local actors, which have more successfully grounded the private equity industry in national political economies than its origins in the Asian crisis period. Second, despite the relative localization of Asian private equity, industry practices are still largely shaped by the US model of private equity and the merger and acquisition activity that it entails, rather than a distinct Asian private equity model. The findings of the article contribute to calls that have been made for research on the changing global economy that comprehensively integrates domestic and international levels of analysis.

Rethinking Primitive Accumulation: Theoretical Tensions and Rural Southeast Asian Complexities

Abstract: This paper poses theoretical and empirical questions to the resurgent litera‐ture on primitive accumulation in critical political economy. The first section outlines the different understandings of capitalism, and of its relationship to primitive accumulation, in the literature, and argues that they complicate efforts to identify instances of primitive accumulation. The second section examines the history of frontier agricultural expansion in Southeast Asia to critique the literature's assumptions about who carries out, and who resists, primitive accumulation. The third section draws on work on Southeast Asian political economy to show that the literature pays insufficient attention to the institutions that govern capitalist social relations. The paper argues that these questions of agency, governance, and the nature of capitalism need to be answered in order to make effective use of the concept of primitive accumulation and to distinguish it from cognate concepts like enclosure and commodification.

Private Equity and Asian Political Economy: "Domestic" Private Equity Funds as New Actors

Private equity funds, particularly those headquartered in the U.S., have come under heavy attack internationally from civil society and regulators. At the same time, locally owned private equity funds have unexpectedly appeared in significant numbers across emerging markets. The analysis in this paper illustrates how actors that are only notionally domestic are introducing the neoliberal private equity model into Asian countries, particularly China and Korea.

Globalizing Taipei: The Political Economy of Spatial Development (review)

Reviewed by: Globalizing Taipei: The Political Economy of Spatial Development David A. Smith (bio) Reginald Yin-Wang Kwok , editor. Globalizing Taipei: The Political Economy of Spatial Development. New York and London: Routledge, 2005. xiv, pp. Hardcover $105.00, ISBN 0-415-35451-x. This volume is based on the well-founded premise that Taipei is a relatively understudied East Asian city (compared to, say, Seoul, Hong Kong, or Singapore). It proposes to analyze "the current political economy of Taipei's development from a globalization perspective," including "key aspects of Taipei's development process toward a global city" (p. 1). As a comparative sociologist who studies global cities and is particularly interested in East Asian political economy (but who knows relatively little about Taipei), my intellectual appetite was whetted. I also appreciated the volume's attempt to provide an insider's perspective on Taipei; with the exception of the editor and one other chapter author (both at the University of Hawai'i), all of the contributors are based in Taiwan. An edited collection grounded in conceptual issues of "globalization" and "global cities" written by scholars with detailed local knowledge offers great promise. [End Page 187] And this is a valuable book. I learned a great deal about Taipei from its chapters. It makes a crucial contribution by providing a wealth of information about the city, its environs, and its pattern of growth and development. Scholars interested in comparisons with other "globalizing cities" in East Asia and around the world will find gems of wisdom here, with some of the chapters singularly informative. But the book fails to live up to its potential. There is the common dilemma of the lack of coherence for an edited collection: it is frequently a problem to make all the essays "fit." The final two chapters, under the heading "Cultural Reorientation," seemed the farthest from the book's title/theme, with the biggest "stretch" being an essay on an ethnic Chinese filmmaker from Malaysia who came to Taiwan and made movies about marginalized people in Taipei. There are also (rather unsurprising) language difficulties for some of the Taiwanese authors writing in English (most of the chapters are well-edited in this regard, but a few could use some work). However, I think the most significant problem is a failure to define clearly some of the key terminology. Editor Kwok introduces "globalization" and the idea of the "global city" in his introduction. These are increasingly popular terms, but they are also frequently invoked by people who mean quite different things. Clear analytical definitions of these two concepts would have helped readers as well as framed these issues for the chapters that follow. The opening Kwok essay (written with Jinn Yuh-Hsu) provides a nice introduction to Taipei's urban primacy, the role of the developmental state and export-oriented industrialization in Taiwan's economic rise, and the South China Growth Triangle (Taipei-Hong Kong-Shanghai). It suggests that Taipei's trajectory is toward a "second-tier" global city, which should have implications for the sorts of "producer services" that develop-a good hypothesis that is borne out in later chapters. Leaving aside the missed opportunity to define some key terms, the facile acceptance of the inevitability of global neoliberalism caused me the most concern. Surely nations like Taiwan, where developmental states have been so crucial (and successful), should be able to mediate some of the effects of this sort of "globalization." The first part of the book is the clearest in focus, examining "economic and spatial restructuring," and the first two essays may be the strongest in the collection. The lead-off chapter by Hsu provides a nice overview of the economic transformation of Taipei from an industrial city prior to the 1970s to an "interface city" coordinating informatics in the 1990s, with an era in between when the city emerged as a "broker" for Western buyers interested in overseas Taiwanese production in places like mainland China and Southeast Asia. This brokerage function-which also became important in places like Seoul and Hong Kong at about the same time-is currently framed by comparative sociologists as a result of the rise of "buyer-driven commodity chains" (à la...

Beyond institutional fetishism: From the developmental to the regulatory state

What became of that great debate between the revisionists or the ‘statists’ and neoclassical economists on the causes of the Asian miracle on which so much ink was spilt? Something curious happened. In the wake of the Asian economic crisis, neoclassical economists crossed the floor and discovered in what they had previously termed ‘market-conforming intervention’ the existence of malevolent political interference in the economy.1 But, if neoclassical economists had uncovered the effects of malign state intervention in the now distinctly tarnished Asian miracles, their erstwhile opponents underwent an equally remarkable conversion and discovered that the much vaunted policy capacities of East Asian developmental state had in fact been sapped by progressive financial liberalisation.2 East Asian political economies, after all, were much more market-oriented than claimed by the statists. All of this confirms the insight of Lakatos that declining research programmes will strive to protect their hard core – the key assumptions of their theory – from falsification through ad hoc hypotheses.3 And one of the things the Asian crisis produced was ad hoc hypotheses by the dozen...

The Adaptive Developmental State in East Asia

In 1997, several of Asia's economies collapsed and the international community was called in to help mend the ailing region. The crisis attracted a great deal of attention among both the scholarly and policy communities. At that time, it seemed that the Asian miracle had come to an abrupt end. Places such as South Korea enjoyed a prosperous run though suffered a dubious demise. Later developers in Southeast Asia and China, having just emerged from out of the starting gate, quickly stalled in their attempts to ride the wave of Asia's postwar economic dynamism. Fortunately, things would not remain dour for too long. Some countries, such as Taiwan and Japan, made it through the crisis relatively unscathed. Both China and South Korea quickly rebounded. Southeast Asian countries, such as Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand, adapted and have consequently begun new growth trajectories. In the end, it seemed that the most severe and lasting casualty of the 1997 crisis was the East Asian developmental state model itself. To be sure, the more recent literatures on East Asian political economy have taken a sharp turn, wherein terms like “booty capitalism” and “crony capitalism” have quickly come to replace more laudatory titles such as the “East Asian Miracle.”

Recasting East Asian Economic Governance: An Institutional Perspective

In this paper, we explore how neo-liberal economic reforms after the 1997 Asian economic crisis significantly restructured the institutional nexus of the East Asian political economy and its economic governance framework in the attempt to restore competitiveness and ensure economic development. Neo-liberal economic reform programs do not simply promote market-oriented policies, but significantly recast how East Asian economic governance should be managed and coordinated. We argue that recasting economic governance requires institutional shift in the framework within which economic transactions occur and in the nexus within which the framework emerges and functions. For this, East Asian states must replace directive and interventionist roles with facilitative and regulatory market reform measures, while the private sector minimizes rent-seeking behavior and monopolistic market power by adopting global standards of liberal capitalism.

Corruption and the effect of regime type: the case of Taiwan

The use of public resources and powers for particularistic purposes and interests serves as a useful (though not all encompassing) starting point for the definition of corruption.1 This definition ...

The perverse realities of change: world system incorporation and the Okhotsk culture of Hokkaido

This paper considers the interplay between human adaptation and political economy in the context of the Okhotsk culture of Hokkaido (c. AD 550–1200). Although it flourished at a time of great change and expansion in the East Asian world system, it is argued that the Okhotsk managed to resist incorporation by that system until its final stages. The resistance to world system domination shown by the Okhotsk people, however, does not mean that they were isolated from macroregional developments. The biocultural reproduction of Okhotsk society cannot be understood only in terms of ecological adaptation but must be placed in the context of the Northeast Asian political economy.

Beyond Late Development: Taiwan's Upgrading Policies. By Alice Amsden and Wan-wen Chu. [Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003. 207 pp. ISBN 0-262-01198-0.

Beyond Late Development offers economist Alice Amsden's most recent contribution (here with co-author Wan-wen Chu) to an already substantial body of work on East Asian political economy. Like her previous work, this book is important first because it trespasses the traditional boundaries of economics, seeking explanations to important developmental policy puzzles from institutional theories and empirical case studies more commonly the province of sociologists and area specialists; and second because it looks beyond Asia's mega-economies to the relatively smaller but still highly relevant late developers of Asia, offering important lessons for both students and practitioners of development policy.Amsden and Chu seek to explain the ability of advanced “latecomer” countries to sustain their global competitiveness in mature high-technology manufacturing and newly-liberalized service industries. They support their argument with previously unpublished data and extensive firm-level interviews from Taiwan, the most successful of these successful latecomers, which Amsden identified in an earlier book, The Rise of “The Rest”(Oxford University Press, 2001). Although Taiwan's leading national firms seldom make the Fortune 500 list, they dominate global market share for many mature, information technology (IT) manufactures. As of 1999, Taiwan produced 85 per cent of the world's scanners, nearly two-thirds of the world's keyboards, power supplies and monitors, and almost 40 per cent of all notebook computers.

Does European Integration Provide a Model for Moderating Cross-Strait Relations?

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsCal ClarkCal Clark is Alumni Professor of Political Science at Auburn University. His research and teaching specialty is East Asian political economy. His recent books include the coauthored Comparative Development Patterns in Asia (Rienner, 1997), and the coedited Beyond the Developmental State (Macmillan, 1998) and Democracy and the Status of Women in East Asia (Rienner, 2002).

The Idea of an “Asian Monetary Fund”: The Problems of Financial Institutionalism in the Asia-Pacific

Asian observers attribute the Asian economic crisis of 1997–1999 to the instability inherent in the global financial system. In response, Asians have discussed creating an Asian Monetary Fund (AMF) to manage future financial crises and have demanded the reform of the global financial architecture. However, the New International Financial Architecture (NIFA) developed since the crisis fails to address the fundamental sources of instability in the present global financial system. This system poses economic and ideological threats to the stability of East Asia. Therefore, regional states have powerful incentives to create an effective AMF. However, traditional security concerns, historical grievances, and political rivalries between the major Asia-Pacific powers limit the prospects of regional cooperation. Under these conditions, it is unlikely that East Asian states can create an effective regional financial institution. However, Asian states still need to protect themselves from global financial volatility. They will probably pursue this goal through bilateral and multilateral arrangements with the regional powers. The Asia-Pacific will maintain a distinctive East Asian political economy.