ABSTRACT
This book is concerned with the growth of large corporations in Southeast Asia, focusing on corporate organization, methods of finance, business environment and corporate governance. These changes in ownership, concentration and governance structure of these family-dominated conglomerates are traced from the immediate postwar period to the present. It is argued that this family-dominated corporate structure exploited banks, capital markets, the state and foreign capital to achieve a dramatic but debt-driven growth. It seeks to understand the dynamism of such a pattern of growth, which, however, had serious impact on corporate governance and corporate stability and was implicated in the economic collapse in the 1997 crisis. The difficulties of restructuring and reforming these corporations after 1997 are, again, linked to this structural and institutional problem.
