ABSTRACT

Over the past two decades, the continued consolidation of Taiwanese democracy has had an impact on the nature of economic policy-making. Numerous scholars have pointed to the seeming decline of the “developmental state,” which has been credited for the “economic miracle” from the 1950s-1980s (Clark and Jung 2002, 2004; Tan and Schneider 2003; Kang and Tan 2004). Using liberalization and changes in the financial sector as a case, this chapter examines how the developmental state has changed (or declined) and how democratization itself may have contributed to its transformation leading to interesting outcomes in Taiwan’s financial industry.