[eBook] [PDF] For Precarious Ties Business and the State in Authoritarian Asia 1st Edition By Meg Rithmire

[eBook] [PDF] For Precarious Ties Business and the State in Authoritarian Asia 1st Edition By Meg Rithmire

Developing Asia has been the site of some of the last century’s fastest growing economies as well as some of the world’s most durable authoritarian regimes. Many accounts of rapid growth alongside monopolies on political power have focused on crony relationships between the state and business. But these relationships have not always been smooth, as anti-corruption campaigns, financial and banking crises, and dramatic bouts of liberalization and crackdown demonstrate. Why do partnerships between political and business elites fall apart over time? And why do some partnerships produce stable growth and others produce crisis or stagnation?

In Precarious Ties, Meg Rithmire offers a novel account of the relationships between business and political elites in three authoritarian regimes in developing Asia: Indonesia under Suharto’s New Order, Malaysia under the Barisan Nasional, and China under the Chinese Communist Party. All three regimes enjoyed periods of high growth and supposed alliances between autocrats and capitalists. Over time, however, the relationships between capitalists and political elites changed, and economic outcomes diverged. While state-business ties in Indonesia and China created dangerous dynamics like capital flight, fraud, and financial crisis, Malaysia’s state-business ties contributed to economic stagnation.