The End of the “Asian Model”? Edited by Holger Henke, Ian Boxill. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Co., 2000. 220 pp., $53.95 (ISBN: 1-55619-745-4). Crony Capitalism: Corruption and Development in South Korea and the Philippines. By David C. Kang Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 220 pp., $60.00 cloth (ISBN: 0-521-80817-0), $23.00 paper (ISBN: 0-521-00408-X). For a decade prior to the 1990s, students and specialists of economic development viewed the Asian Model as setting the standard for rapid economic growth and improved standards of living. The dramatic growth of economies in Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and Singapore in particular far surpassed that of the Western industrialized economies. Numerous books extolled the virtues of the Asian Model. Corporations in the United States sent delegations to Japan to learn the “secrets” of Japanese economic success. One problem with the concept of the Asian Model, of course, is that “Asia” is not a homogeneous area. Indeed, the region's heterogeneity is paramount, despite the view of many that Asia will be the twenty-first century's premier region. Moreover, in the early 1990s the Asian Model began to lose its luster. Japan began its long recession, and in 1997 the Asian economic crisis severely and negatively affected standards of living throughout most of the region. All of a sudden economic prospects seemed to reverse direction. Japanese investors gave up real estate and other holdings in the West, and delegations of Japanese and Korean corporate and government leaders visited the United States and Europe to find more effective ways of running their economies. In this context, a key strength of Holger Henke and Ian Boxill's The End of the “Asian Model”? is their understanding of Asia's diversity as well as their related view that the transfer of one nation's development theory to another is problematic. Henke and Boxill have chosen to include separate chapters on a unique set of Asian nations: Singapore, Mongolia, Sri Lanka, South Korea, and the Island Pacific. This array of nations …