"The debate on the major factors contributing to Southeast Asian industrialization continues unabated. As might be expected, there is much at stake in this debate. The debate is largely ideological in nature and partly centers on the role and contribution of state interventions and other institutions in market processes in the context of late industrialization. At the risk of caricaturing the debate, on the one hand, one finds the dominant and more influential position held by those who blame the state for all that has gone wrong and credit the market for all that has turned out right; on the other hand, the minority statist extreme position basically credits most major economic achievements in East Asia to appropriate interventions by developmentalist states. While very few people would actually fully identify with either of these caricatured extremes, much of the discussion actually gravitates around either of these poles. "

This volume provides highly illuminating, analytic perspectives on key facets of the East Asian economies. It discusses weaknesses in the financial sector, corporate governance, exchange rate and trade policies, regulatory capability, and proposes remedies. Rethinking the East Asian Miracle is an indispensable book for all those with an interest in East Asia's prospects in the early decades of the new century.

Drawing on a wide range of expertise, this volume addresses fundamental issues surrounding industrialization in Southeast Asia, which are particularly pressing now that the region's miracle has been transformed into a debacle, and the world seeks to draw lessons from the experience. The contributors address crucial questions such as: How did Southeast Asia industrialize? What have been the consequences of domination by foreign investment? Did the region's resource wealth weaken its imperative to industrialize? Why else has Southeast Asia's industrialization been inferior to the rest of the East Asian region? Did the countries' financial systems help industrialization? Was this industrialization sustainable? The volume includes detailed studies of Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia.

In the new edition of this important contribution to understanding both the Asian economic miracle and the 1997-8 crisis, Richard Stubbs assesses the main explanations to date and updates the analysis to take account of globalization and the remarkable economic rise of China.

"An examination of how dictators and democrats in Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand built and sustained pro-growth political coalitions"--

Business, Government and Labor in the Economic Development of Singapore and Southeast Asia analyzes the inter-linked and evolving roles of private sector business, government public policy, and labor markets in the economic development of Singapore and its Southeast Asian neighborhood. It does this through 16 essays written by Prof. Linda Y C Lim, an early and long-established scholar of these subjects, and published over a 35-year period. For Singapore, often considered the world's most successful economy, the essays highlight the determining role of government's industrial and social policy through to the present day, when the growth model of the past faces many external market and domestic resource constraints. In the rest of Southeast Asia, in contrast, the essays explore how private sector business, dominated by the locally-domiciled ethnic Chinese minority, thrived and drove economic growth in underdeveloped markets with imperfect institutions, and consider if and how this might change with China's increasing presence in the regional economy. A final set of essays analyzes the forces underlying women's employment, from labor-intensive Southeast Asian export factories in the 1980s to Singapore's foreign-labor-dependent economy and its current productivity challenges. Taken together, the essays show how government, business and labor interact in the process of economic development.