Dictators, democrats, and development in Southeast Asia: implications for the rest

Extract

One of the more peculiar legacies of developmental economics is the large and ever-expanding body of analysis on the topic of economic growth. Libraries of texts have been written to explain its foundations, trajectories and periodic abeyances. Regardless of on-the-ground economic conditions, distilled ‘lessons’ and summary policy prescriptions have long enjoyed double-digit growth.

For good reason, disputes are endemic to the literature. Economic history requires a considerable amount of best-guess work. Incomplete data sets are compiled and gleaned for patterns to deploy in support of big-picture theories and paradigms, often with profound socio-political implications. Causes and consequences get linked together in historical narratives that elide—but never eliminate—alternative explanations.

The study under review here, an ambitious effort to account for the factors that led to rapid and ‘more or less shared’ economic growth in Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand, is a case in point. A revisitation of that old Cold War ally, the developmental state, it explains post-1960 economic ‘takeoff’ in rather stock terms: the developmental ‘failures’ of earlier eras; disruptive elite power struggles for control of the state; and—of course—the eventual emergence of pro-capitalist conservative political coalitions that remained flexible but determined in their pursuit of national economic development.