ABSTRACT
Accounts of the extraordinary economic transformation of East Asia in the post-Second World War era are often crudely polarized, overemphasizing the role of economics or politics, states or non-state actors. While a consensus on the final balance of causal factors has yet to be settled, it is likely that the most convincing accounts will start from the assumption that all of these factors have been influential. The task is to describe how in particular societies a range of social forces and conditions have initiated and shaped economic change. In short, how has economic development been governed? In the case of East Asia this chapter argues that key state institutions and economic bureaucracies have been at the core of a web of economic governance, but the strategies pursued by those bureaucracies, the power resources available to them, their mode of rule and their relationships with political elites, business corporations and other social groups are very variable. In this chapter I look at three key differences in modes of economic governance. First, what have been the core bureaucratic institutions of economic governance and what strategies have they pursued? Second, what economic and political resources have they had available to them? Economic resources might include access to national savings accounts, or the ability to control significant tax revenue from resource extraction or powerful leverage over the policy of the banking sector. These in turn allow bureaucracies to shape and direct infrastructural and other investments. Political resources might include an entrenched system of legal controls over business, or access to a steady stream of highly educated personnel or culturally ingrained patterns of hierarchy and deference. Third, what is the overall political context in which these bureaucracies have operated and how insulated have they been from the demands of social groups and political elites. In this chapter I explore the importance of authoritarian politics to economic development; the nature of the relationships between bureaucratic elites, politicians and business, and the capacities of these key actors to exclude others from the process of economic governance. Above all, I look at how labour has been marginalized, incorporated or compensated in the process of economic change.
