ABSTRACT
East Asia presents scholars of political economy with a number of puzzles and paradoxes. First and foremost, East Asia has defied the developmental odds. While most of the non-western world has struggled and often failed to break out of a vicious cycle of underdevelopment, growth rates in East Asia have greatly exceeded those in all other regions of the world. Since current economic wisdom holds that, ceteris paribus, higher levels of corruption should be associated with lower rates of development,1 East Asia’s economic success is paradoxical because most of the region’s countries have been dogged by relatively serious high-level corruption throughout the period of rapid growth.
