Lineages of liberalism and miracles of modernisation:
The World Bank, the East Asian trajectory and the
international development debate
By Mark T. Berger and Mark Beeson
The crisis in East Asia has raised important questions both about the way in
which the East Asian developmental trajectory has been understood and the
relevance of the East Asian model to modernisation elsewhere in the world. Until
recently the World Bank played an important role in encouraging the perception
that the East Asian trajectory was a veritable miracle of capitalist development.
More broadly, for many years the Bank has occupied a central international
position in the production and dissemination of development knowledge about
East Asia and the rest of the world. In concert with a number of other key,
transnational regulatory agencies like the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the
Bank has also been instrumental in attempting to shape the overall contours of
East Asia’ s political economy. Yet the World Bank’ s influence, and its
understanding of development should not be conceptualised in monolithic terms.1
Over time the conception of development encouraged by the Bank has shifted,
mirroring wider trends in the international political economy. This article begins
with a brief discussion of the changes in the World Bank’s understanding of
development over the past 30 or 40 years. This is followed by an examination of
the Bank’ s efforts to accommodate the East Asian trajectory within the dominant
Anglo-American narrative on international development. It will be emphasised
that the changes in the Bank’s understanding of capitalist development in East
Asia have taken place in the context of the overall transformation of the
international political economy since 1945. In short, the World Bank has been a
major participant in the wider reinvention of liberalism which has been central to
the history of the international development debate in the Cold War and post-cold
War era.2 An examination of its historical role and the shifts in the model of East
Asian development it has promoted tells us much about both the Bank and the
wider international system of which it is an important part.
Lineages of liberalism
The World Bank and cold war liberalism
The World Bank came into existence as part of the overall Bretton Woods system
which emerged from the capitalist crisis, global war and reconstruction of the
1930s and 1940s. The Bank – along with the IMF – was envisioned by the
victorious allied powers as an instrument which could be used both to
consolidate and manage the postwar international political economy.3 Not only
was the Bank charged with providing the capital and expertise with which to kickstart post-1945 reconstruction, it was also an important component in locking
countries into a US-centred economic order – a critical consideration in the light
of the emerging superpower rivalry between the USA and the Soviet Union.
Indeed, it is important to remember that, particularly in the immediate postwar
period, the Soviet Union was widely seen as a serious alternative to the crisisridden capitalist system which had been mired in the Great Depression before
the outbreak of World War II.4 From its inception, therefore, the Bank was
grounded in the wider power relations of the Cold War. This period saw the
establishment of an elite liberal consensus about both the appropriate model of
economic development and the best approach to the management of
international economic relations.5 As time passed this consensus shifted, moving
from what Ruggie has described as the ‘embedded liberalism’ of the Keynesianinspired early Cold War era, to the neoliberal order that began to emerge in the
1970s.6
Before the 1970s the conception of, and approach to, development which
emanated from the World Bank reflected the Keynesian consensus and the cold
war liberalism (liberal developmentalism or classical modernisation theory) of the
US political and economic elite. The overall strategy of the USA towards what
became known after 1945 as the ‘developing world’ built on the experience of
anti-communist reconstruction in Europe in the late 1940s and 1950s. The 1947
effort to keep Greece and Turkey from succumbing to international communism
relied on both military and economic aid. After the apparent success of the
economic component of the containment strategy on the eastern fringe of
Europe, the Marshall Plan was launched in 1948 with the aim of facilitating the
rebuilding of Western Europe.7 The apparent success of anti-communist
reconstruction in much of Europe, and latterly in Northeast Asia, contributed to
‘the full flowering of liberal developmentalism’ in the 1960s, manifested most
dramatically in the Alliance for Progress in Latin America and the US anticommunist crusade in Vietnam.8 These influences were readily apparent during
Robert McNamara’ s presidency (1968-81) of the Bank. McNamara had served
as Secretary of Defense in both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and
was one of the key architects of the Vietnam War until his resignation in 1968,
when he took up the presidency of the World Bank.9 The overall approach of
McNamara and other cold war warriors of his generation was conditioned by the
idea that the poverty of nation-states in Asia, Africa and Latin America was the
key to the spread of communism. Into the 1970s the presumption that there was
a direct link between poverty and revolution, and that the communist threat could
be eliminated via the emulation of the approach to economic modernisation
believed to have been followed in North America and Western Europe, was at
the heart of the dominant international discourse on development.10 Under
McNamara the World Bank significantly expanded its lending at the same time as
the ‘alleviation of poverty’ was promoted as a major focus of the organisation’ s
activity.
The Bank in the McNamara era reflected some of the optimism characteristic of
the wider cold war liberalism (liberal developmentalism or classical modernisation
theory) which had emerged after 1945. For example, in the mid-1970s Hollis
Chenery, the World Bank’ s Vice-President for Development Policy initiated a
study of the Bank’ s record on economic development since 1950.11 Although the
study was prepared by an outside consultant (David Morawetz) the conclusions it
drew crystallised the official viewpoint of the Bank in the McNamara era. Overall
the study, like the Bank in the 1970s, took the view that on a global scale
economic growth had been rapid and dramatic; however, this growth continued
to be very poorly distributed. The Morawetz report was confident to the point of
complacency that the eradication of poverty is not likely to be just another fad’ ,
that the ‘problems of monoproduct economies’ could be mitigated, that excessive
concern about debt problems was misplaced, and that the dramatic growth in
commercial lending in the 1970s was not a cause for concern. Only with the
second oil crisis (1979-80) did the Bank express any public reservations about
the international financial system’ s ability to recycle enough funds to maintain
economic growth and systemic stability.12 This, combined with anti-inflation
policies of recently elected neo-liberal governments, such as the Thatcher
administration in the UK, and the anticipation that energy prices might continue to
rise dramatically throughout the 1980s, convinced McNamara that the world
economy had undergone a permanent change. Once the perception of
permanent change in the world economy took hold of the Bank in 1980, various
other policy conclusions followed. While financial assistance to governments of
developing countries had been used in the past as ‘a substitute for structural
adjustment’ , it was increasingly used to ‘support structural adjustment’.13 Thus
the changing international context allowed the Bank to use structural adjustment
loans to lock recipient governments into a particular sort of politico-economic
order, one that reflected both the interests and assumptions of its major
sponsors.
The World Bank and the neoliberal ascendancy
In the early 1980s neoliberal governments (particularly the Reagan
administration in the USA and the Thatcher administration in the UK) were in the
ascendant in North America and Western Europe. The neoliberal ascendancy,
however, did not flow from the inherent rationality of neoliberal policies - it was
grounded in part in the apparent intractability of the economic and social
problems of the 1970s. The apparent inability of the various governments in
power in North America and Western Europe (and beyond) to deal with risinginflation was a central component of the rise of neoliberalism during the late
1970s. Cold war revivalism played an equally important role in defence and
foreign affairs; significantly, however, opposition to the new Cold War was more
effective than opposition to neoliberal economics.14 More broadly, the emergence
of neoliberalism as the dominant narrative on development was linked directly to
the dramatic changes in the overall character of the international political
economy in the 1980s. Neoliberalism seemed to offer simple solutions to the
economic problems of the North American and Western European electorates, its
programme meshing with the aims and assumptions of a complex array of
transnational forces which were the motor and the main beneficiaries of the
neoliberal (and emergent globalisation) project.15
Significantly these wider shifts were marked by the end of McNamara’ s tenure
as president of the World Bank. He was succeeded in 1981 by Alden Winship
(Tom) Clausen. During Clausen’ s presidency (1981-86) the conception of
development which had predominated at the Bank during the McNamara era was
more or less erased. Clausen, whose previous position had been at the head of
the Bank of America - the biggest commercial bank in the world - made it clear
to the World Bank’ s top executives at the outset that he had no intention of
maintaining his predecessor’ s focus on poverty alleviation. Mahbub Ul Haq, a
long-time Bank staffer and adviser to McNamara, suggests that Clausen, a
proponent of supply-side economics, was adamant ‘that the only constituency
that mattered was the United States’.16 During the 1980s poverty alleviation was
‘demoted to priority zero’ with so-called structural adjustment policies taking its
place.17 The dramatic shift in development thinking at the Bank was clearly
represented by the Berg Report which was published in 1981. The official title of
the Berg Report was Accelerated Development in Sub-Saharan Africa: An
Agenda for Action and was written by Elliot Berg.18 The report relied on insights
drawn from rational choice theory to evaluate the developmental record of
governments in sub-Saharan Africa. Its prescriptions centred on the need for a
greatly reduced role for the state in the economy and much greater reliance on
the market as a means of accelerating economic activity, particularly in the
agricultural sector. However, it is misleading to view the Bank during Clausen’ s
presidency as being united around the neoliberalism reflected in the Berg Report.
Under Clausen the Bank experienced greater policy fragmentation and diversity
than was the case during the McNamara era.
In this period, for example, the research department of the World Bank was
characterised by a particularly devout commitment to neoliberalism and an
intolerance of dissent which was not necessarily shared by other sections of the
Bank. After 1981 the research department’s operations and activities were
devoted increasingly to ‘large projects designed to substantiate what everyone
knew in their hearts already: that economic liberalization was right’.19 The head of
the research department was Anne Krueger, whom Clausen had hired to replace
Hollis Chenery, the Bank’ s chief economic theorist in the McNamara era.
According to one insider, Krueger was not interested in debating economic policy
and ‘she cut off anybody who ever had any relationship with Hollis Chenery’.20
Nevertheless, staff on the operational side maintained a degree of pragmatism in
their overall approach and policy prescriptions. Even during the early to mid1980s, which were by far the most doctrinaire, the World Bank did not become a
neoliberal monolith, and ‘for every research report vindicating the neoliberal
position, one could find another Bank publication which looked more soberly at
the social and technological constraints on development’.21 For example, the
World Development Report 1987, which focused on trade and industrialisation,
outlined an approach to economic development that was particularly adamant in
its commitment to neoliberalism;22 Four years later, however, in the 1991 World
Development Report, entitled The Challenge of Development, it was emphasised
that market-friendly policies - neither complete laissez faire nor interventionism are optimal for growth and income distribution’.23
The end of the high period of neoliberalism at the World Bank had been reached
long before 1991, however. and was marked by the change of Presidents from
Clausen to Barber Conable in 1986. During Conable’ s tenure as president
(1986-91) the Bank was reorganised in an effort to make it more effective and
smaller. Conable sought to reduce the organisation’s 6000 employees by 10%
and break the influence of powerful long-time managers, particularly Ernest
Stern, the economist who ‘had been the de facto power in the Bank since
McNamara’s retirement’. The Bank certainly was shaken up in the months after
Conable first took over, but even before Conable left the number of its staff had
returned to 6000 and most of the powerful and long serving ‘politically attuned
bureaucrats’ at the Bank remained in place. For example, Ernest Stern remained
at the Bank long after Conable had retired.24 Nevertheless, while Conable was
at the helm, the organisation’ s public image was seen to be more consensual
than under Clausen, while poverty alleviation and the mitigation of the social
costs of structural adjustment were given greater prominence. The neoliberal
ideologues in the research department departed and the department itself
disappeared as a separate Vice-Presidency in the reorganisation of 1987.
However, as we will see, the World Bank’ s understanding of development into
the 1990s continued to be, or increasingly became, influenced by rational choice
theory (the new institutionalism and the new political economy), resulting in a
highly mechanistic approach to the dynamics of political and economic change in
the various countries which the researchers at the Bank sought to understand.25
Despite the shifts in neoliberalism between the late 1970s and the early 1990s,
the 1980s saw the institutional and discursive consolidation of market-centred
ideas, something that the demise of the Soviet Union (1989-91) as the most
serious challenger to the hegemony of Anglo-American-style capitalism simply
served to reinforce. ‘Actually existing socialism’ in the Soviet Union and around
the world had attempted from the beginning to ‘mimic the economic achievements of capitalism’ , laying down objectives which capitalism was ‘obviously
much better equipped than socialism to achieve’.26 However, the fall of state
socialism by the end of the 1980s reinforced the process of neoliberal
consolidation which drew considerable sustenance from the view that the
collapse of the Soviet bloc was a victory for the particular type of capitalism that
predominated in Britain and North America in the 1980s.27 This, combined with
the idea that a new international consensus on development was in place by the
early 1990s at the same time as the end of the Cold War, meant, in theory, that
more concessions (or at least gestures) could be made in the direction of
planning and the role of government, sustainable development issues and
environmental concerns. This conjuncture was encapsulated in October 1991 in
an opening address to the annual World Bank and IMF meeting in Bangkok by
Conable’ s successor as president, Lewis Preston. In his speech the new
president of the Bank asserted that the demise of the Soviet bloc had led to ‘the
broad convergence of development thinking which has replaced ideological
conflict’ , while a consensus based on the free-market, a balance between the
private sector and government and sustainable economic growth was spreading
around the globe.28 Ultimately the 1980s and early 1990s witnessed the
entrenchment of what Stephen Gill describes as ‘market civilization’ - the
transformative practices by which capitalist expansion becomes bound up with a
legitimating neoliberal discourse of progress and development.29 Importantly,
although it is a movement which is reinforced by the application of the political
power of key actors like the USA, at another level its most subtle quality has
been the way in which market-mediated social relations have become integral to
common sense understandings of development.30
The World Bank and the international development debate
The World Bank has occupied a central position in the wider consolidation of
neoliberalism, as declarations such as Lewis Preston’ s remind us. The Bank is
significant both as the source of authoritative knowledge about economic
development and because of its key role in setting the agenda in the international
development debate. This flows from its possession of an unrivalled budget for
research and policy-formulation capacity in comparison to any other development
organisation. At the same time, the World Bank is able to attract a high degree of
international media attention for its pronouncements and major reports. This
‘intellectual’ influence is directly reinforced by its economic leverage with
governments around the world looking for investment, loans and foreign aid.31
The ideas that form much of the Bank’ s policy agenda are also produced and
disseminated in part by its own think-tank. Set up in 1956, using financial support
from the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, the Economic Development Institute
(EDI) instructed people from a wide range of ‘developing countries’ in the
creation and management of projects commensurate with the Bank’s overall
conception of development. According to its first director, Sir Alexander
Cairncross, the intention of the EDI was to ensure that by associating with and
studying at the Bank, students ‘would carry with them ideas that were more
congenial to the Bank when they went back to their own country’. Certainly, a
number of EDI graduates have achieved positions of prominence in their
countries of origin. In the late 1970s Cairncross observed that EDI graduates
‘more or less ran’ South Korea, and in Pakistan there were ‘a great many ex-EDI
men who quite consciously were pulling together and having an influence on
development’.32
The USA remains the Bank’ s most powerful member, although its position as a
Bank shareholder is greatly reduced. However, the USA still chooses the head of
the Bank and it is the only country with a veto over amendments to its Articles of
Agreement. Furthermore, the USA closely monitors Bank activities, and is the
only Bank member to review all loan proposals in detail: officials of the Treasury
Department are in daily contact not only with the US executive director but with
other Bank officials.33 By the 1950s Washington’ s geopolitical goals were
consistently linked to the economic and financial reforms the World Bank and the
IMF demanded of governments around the world. The US government has
always been candid about this linkage. As one US official noted in the 1970s, the
IMF and the World Bank ‘use their loans as leverage to encourage positive
economic performance and acceptance of market economy principles in recipient
countries’. It is clear that the USA has effectively dominated the World Bank, the
IMF and their affiliates. As Kolko notes, over 40% of the World Bank’ s top
managers are US citizens and the president has always been a US citizen (the
most recent Australian-born president being something of an exception).34
US influence is also grounded in the Bank’ s dependence on world financial
markets, the central position of the USA as a global financial centre, and the
closely aligned interests of key financial actors with those of US foreign policy.
This influence is further entrenched in the Bank’s institutionalised norms and
culture. At least 80% of the economists working for the World Bank are trained in
the UK or North America. Their approach and outlook, and that of virtually all of
the remaining 20%, is based on the assumptions and methodologies of AngloAmerican liberalism and neoclassical economic thought. Robert Wade argues
that economists who do not subscribe to the main precepts of neoclassical
economics are unlikely even to be employed by the Bank, while the small
number of social scientists from other disciplines work for the Bank on peripheral
projects and have no influence over economic policy formulation.35 Interestingly,
before the 1960s the operations and overall approach to development which
characterised the World Bank were driven in part by the preponderance of
professional engineers within the institution and their vision of development as
the funding and building of physical structures.36
The current dominance of neoclassical economists within the upper echelons of
the Bank is reinforced by its internal review process. Within the Bank, policy
documents go through a process of review and evaluation moving upwards
through the numerous echelons of the organisation. Each echelon works to
narrow the overall perspective. It is not just that higher levels are more
concerned with the Bank’ s and the system’ s integrity than with the integrity of
the research. It is also that promotion criteria for the higher levels favour people
who make decisions quickly and with closure, using ‘facts’ selectively to support
preconceived patterns and convictions. This process is complemented by a
conformist culture in which the Bank’ s prevailing editorial line is rigidly
followed.37 This is especially significant given the sheer volume of the Bank’ s
widely disseminated and authoritative research. Yet, despite the Bank’ s internal
culture of conformity and the undoubted influence of mainstream economics on
the literature that emerges from it, the Bank is not immune to external influences.
Quite how potentially significant such influences can be is revealed by the shifts
in the Bank’ s understanding of the East Asian trajectory.
Miracles of modernisation
The World Bank and the East Asian trajectory
By the 1980s, the World Bank, more than any other institution, was playing a key
role in interpreting what was increasingly being viewed as the miraculous
industrialisation of East Asia. Significantly, this interpretation was refracted
through a pervasive framework of neoliberal ideas. The central prescription which
the World Bank increasingly offered to governments in so-called developing
countries was that underdevelopment was caused by excessive state
intervention in the economy. It argued that privatisation and liberalisation would
encourage economic growth and economic efficiency. To support their argument
they pointed to countries such as South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and
Singapore, which they characterised as exemplars of the success of the freemarket model, while pointing to the apparent failure of the public-interventionist
model adopted by governments in Africa and Latin America.38
The rise of the Newly Industrialising Economies (NIEs) of East Asia was
consequently interpreted as a natural outgrowth of capitalist expansion. One of
the best known World Bank economists to consistently articulate a neoclassical
interpretation of industrialisation in East Asia has been Bela Balassa. From
Balassa’ s perspective, comparative advantage - or the idea that countries
should specialise in what they are ‘naturally’ best at - is a key factor in economic
development. From this point of view the natural unfolding of the world economy
results in the movement of national economies from the production of low
technology goods to the manufacture of higher technology goods, as a particular
country’ s comparative advantage shifts unskilled labour-intensive manufacturing
to skilled capital-intensive production.39 In the late 1980s Balassa argued that,
with the exception of Hong Kong, the NIEs had all gone through an initial stage of
import-substitution industrialisation, but in contrast to late industrialising nationstates in Latin America, the East Asian NIEs had subsequently and successfully
embraced export-orientated industrialisation. For Balassa, this external
orientation was a central and dynamic element of the comparative advantage
framework, insofar as an external orientation facilitated the overcoming of
domestic constraints, undercutting monopolistic and protectionist economic
arrangements, and encouraging competition and the pursuit of technological
improvement.40 Fitting the rise of East Asia into an economic framework
grounded in Anglo-American liberalism increasingly became not simply a
theoretical challenge, but an inherently political exercise. Other prominent
economists, operating within the ambit of Anglo-American liberalism, took pains
to construct explanations that presented the success of even the most obviously
state-led developmental trajectories, such as Japan, as primarily the result of
market forces.41
The attempt to depict the East Asian experience as essentially a ‘normal’ part of
capitalist development that was in accord with the precepts of neoclassical
economics was significant for several reasons. First, interpreting East Asian
development as a lesson in neoclassical economics inevitably informed the
policy initiatives of both regional governments and those outside agencies and
actors like the Bank, the IMF and the USA, which sought to influence or deal with
them. Second, it was significant because it increasingly flew in the face of an
overwhelming amount of evidence detailing the attempts by various governments
in East Asia to shape the content and direction of economic activity directly,
rather than waiting passively for market forces to determine key economic
outcomes. There is no intention here to review in depth the contending positions
in this debate, nor the voluminous literature that accompanies it. Rather, it is
sufficient to note that since the 1980s there has been an increasing number of
‘revisionist’ Anglo-American policy-orientated works which attempts to challenge
the dominant neoliberal approach to economic development and emphasise the
role of the state in capitalist development.42 This literature, and approaches to
and perceptions of the East Asian experience which originate from within the
region generally, bear little resemblance to the vision of East Asia conjured up by
neoclassical economists and the avatars of Anglo-American liberalism. Not only
does the lineage of ‘Asian’ economic ideas owe more to the formulations of
Friedrich List than it does to Adam Smith, but there are highly distinctive regional
views about the character and purpose of capitalist organisation, and the place of
a more assertive East Asian region and its distinctive patterns of political and
economic organisation more generally.43
The World Bank and the struggle for the East Asian model
Even if the relative success of the state-led East Asian development trajectory is
in question, states in the region clearly acted as if intervention was likely to be
efficacious, effectively undermining both the normative and theoretical aspects of
neoclassical economics. Furthermore, as we shall see, the Bank itself has come
to accept that state intervention has played a key role in regional development.
Thus, despite the continuity in basic assumptions, the Bank’ s views on East Asia
and on economic development more generally. have been influenced by the
wider international situation of which they are a part. This is readily apparent in
the case of the now famous 1993 World Bank report entitled The East Asian
Miracle.44 The 1993 report was funded by the Japanese Ministry of Finance and
carried out in the context of ongoing efforts by the Japanese government to get
the World Bank to revise its commitment to a neoliberal model of development,
and by implication, to take the Japanese alternative more seriously.45 Thus, the
East Asian Miracle report was a profoundly political document produced out of a
complex struggle within the Bank and between the Bank and the Japanese
government. While the Japanese government was not happy with the final
product, the 1993 report was significant in that, for the first time in a major Bank
publication, it conceded that government intervention had played some role in
economic development in most of East Asia.46
Pressure for such a concession, if not a more dramatic acknowledgment of the
role of the state in economic development, had been building throughout the
1980s. Despite the growing international influence of neoliberalism, the Japanese
government continued to ‘intervene’ in economic activity in a manner that flouted
the rising neoliberal narrative. This ensured that it was increasingly subject to
criticism in the context of apparently interminable trade disputes with the USA.47
During the 1980s the Japanese government continued to direct or assist the
expansion of Japanese corporations overseas.48 In 1987, for example, the
Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) planned a regional
industrialisation strategy for the governments of Southeast Asia, a key element of
which was the allocation of ‘directed credit’. At the end of the 1980s, the
Japanese Ministry of Finance (MOF) set up the ASEAN-Japan Development
Fund, which was administered by Japan’ s main aid agency and sought to
provide credit to the private sector. Officials at the World Bank conveyed their
concern about this approach through informal channels, but had no discernible
effect. Meanwhile, in June 1989, Masaki Shiratori became the World Bank’ s new
Executive Director for Japan. The Japanese government was the second ranking
shareholder in the World Bank (after the USA) and Shiratori, a senior MOF
official, was ‘determined to make the Bank pay more attention to the East Asian
experience’ generally, rethink direct credit policies, and take the Japanese and
East Asian approaches to industrialisation and development seriously.49
The potential for increased conflict over competing visions of regional
development was exacerbated by the appointment, in January 1991, of
Lawrence Summers to the position of chief economist and vice-president at the
Bank. Summers, a Harvard academic, was well known for dismissing Japanese
economists as ‘second rate’. At the same time, it was Summers who came up
with the term ‘market friendly’, which was used to soften the overall free-market
approach of the final version of the World Development Report 1991: The
Challenge to Development.50 Not surprisingly, the terminological change did little
to mollify the concerns of the Japanese government, which continued to promote
its own model of economic development using its increasing power in the Bank
and the IMF as leverage.51 In an address at the World Bank and the IMF’ s Board
of Governors annual meeting in October 1991, Yasushi Mieno, then head of the
Bank of Japan, argued that the East Asian experience demonstrated the
significance of government intervention. In his speech, which had been drafted
by the Ministry of Finance’ s International Finance Bureau, he made an explicit
appeal for the IMF and the World Bank to initiate a ‘wide-ranging study that
would define the theoretical underpinning of this approach and clarify the areas in
which it can be successfully applied to other parts of the globe’.52 At the same
meeting the World Bank’ s vice-president and managing director, Attila
Karaosmanoglu suggested that the NIEs of East Asia ‘and their successful
emulators are a powerful argument that a more activist. positive governmental
role can be a decisive factor in rapid industrial growth’, concluding that ‘what is
replicable and transferable must be brought to light and shared with others’.53
However, many officials at the World Bank viewed the Japanese model as a
threat for a number of reasons. In the first instance, the concessionary credit
which was part of the Japanese approach to development aid undermined the
attractiveness of credit provided by the World Bank. Second, the emphasis on
the importance of directed credit as an instrument of industrial policy which is
characteristic of the Japanese approach is at odds with the Bank’s overarching
focus on financial liberalisation. The upper echelons of the Bank also feared that,
if they put their imprimatur on the developmental state model, it would undermine
the Bank’s own credit rating (and therefore borrowing and lending capacity) with
the international money markets and its authority in the international economic
system more generally. For the Bank to change its attitude towards the Japanese
model would also represent a major challenge to the USA, which has historically
used the Bank in its overall projection of power and influence. From the point of
view of the World Bank, the Japanese model also gives legitimacy to the
‘interventionist impulses’ which exist among the governments and elites of the
various countries which are beholden to the World Bank. Ultimately, for those
looking out on the world from the commanding heights of the World Bank, the
Japanese model was a ‘systemic threat’ to the status quo.54
It is not surprising, then, that although the East Asian Miracle report
acknowledged that the state had, and could, play a role in economic
development, it continued to emphasise that the ‘essence of the miracle’ involved
‘getting the basics right’.55 Furthermore, it continued to treat economic
development as a technical policy question, in which the role of the state (or
government institutions) was not seen as particularly relevant to an overall
understanding of successful capitalist development, even if it was important to
particular economic activities at particular times. However, even as the role of the
state was being acknowledged, but downplayed, by the World Bank - to the
annoyance of the Japanese sponsors of the 1993 report - the way was being
paved for greater accommodation of the state-centred perspective in the context
of the wider and ongoing reinvention of liberalism.
The World Bank, the state and the reinvention of liberalism
At the end of the 1980s, the Bank began to produce a series of reports in which
the idea of ‘good governance’ was critical.56 Again, the focus was increasingly on
a search for supposedly optimal forms of economic management, rather than
positing capitalism as a paradigmatic rival to a declining or defunct state-socialist
alternative. Although the World Bank’ s conception of development in the
immediate aftermath of the Cold War had broadened somewhat in the changed
political context, it also began to take on an increasingly ‘technical’ aspect.57 The
concept of good governance which emerged in this period depicted the
relationship between the political and the economic in a way which clearly
reflected the influence of predominantly Anglo-American political thought and the
essentially liberal notion of state neutrality.58 As critics have been quick to point
out, the Bank’ s interest in governance issues and its apolitical conception of the
state allowed the bank to promote market-orientated reforms without necessarily
challenging established elites whose position and power might be threatened by
more serious calls for political reform.59 Nevertheless, the growing emphasis on
good governance helped to pave the way for greater attention to the state.
Significantly, the notion of good governance has been taken up by elites in many
parts of the world, including East Asia. Tommy Koh, former Singaporean
representative to the United Nations, head of the Asia-Europe Foundation and a
well known advocate of Asian values, has argued that the development of a
shared conception of, and commitment to, good governance would help ground
wider East-West relations.60
The overall process of revising liberalism in a way which incorporates the
technocratic and elitist notion of good governance, and which accommodates the
state-led development trajectory of East Asia to neo-classical economics, is
clearly apparent in The Key to the Asian Miracle which was published in 1996.
Although not a World Bank publication as such, the book was written by JoseÂ
Edgardo Campos, a World Bank economist and co-author of the 1993 Miracle
report, and Hilton L Root an economic historian based at the Hoover Institution at
Stanford University. In their book, they attempt to outline ‘concrete lessons for
the rest of the developing world’ by examining ‘the rationality of the structure and
performance’ of key institutions in East Asia. From their point of view, although
East Asian institutions are not necessarily ‘directly transferable’ to other nationstates, knowing how they operate can still provide a ‘guide’ for other
governments facing similar economic problems.61 Their analysis, which clearly
reflects the influence of rational choice theory (the new institutionalism and/or the
new political economy) represents the high-performing Asian economies, or
HPAEs, (Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore. Thailand,
Malaysia and Indonesia) as variations of a generalised form of enlightened and
paternalistic authoritarianism. They argue that the governments of the HPAEs
were aware that successful economic development necessitated coordinating the
‘expectations’ of various groups. This led to the crafting of institutional
arrangements that sought to distribute ‘the benefits of growth-enhancing policies
widely’, while reassuring businesses and individuals ‘that they would share the
growth dividend’. In the prescriptive tone which pervades their study, they
emphasise that ‘sharing gave the less fortunate a stake in the economy’. This
worked to discourage ‘disruptive activities’ and reduced ‘the risk of regime
failure’. Importantly, it also allowed the various governments to focus ‘on
promoting rational economic policies by reducing the need to constantly contend
with issues of redistribution’.62
The authors observe that the East Asian regimes which have presided over the
successful economic growth of the past decades are regularly regarded ‘as
authoritarian, even dictatorial’. They argue that this perception is misleading and
‘occurs largely because of the failure of Western observers to recognise in East
Asia systems for ensuring accountability and consensus building that differ from
Western-style institutions’. They emphasise that ‘the mechanisms that
Westerners expect to see - written constitutions, elected legislators, a formal
system of checks and balances - are but one set of solutions to establishing
regime legitimacy and guaranteeing limits on government action’. From their
point of view they have made clear that there are ‘other ways of’ mobilising
‘public support’ and ‘restraining ruling cliques from overriding the economic rights
of others’. Furthermore, although the different HPAEs vary significantly from each
other, they ‘share enough common elements to suggest a developmental model
that differs from the trajectory of the Western democracies and from the
autocracies of the past and present’. According to the authors, instead of
behaving ‘like roving bandits’ the regimes of the HPAEs ‘have considered the
future output of society and have offered incentives to productive investment
(physical and human) that are typically found only in the Western democracies’.
They conclude that, while the future for the HPAEs is uncertain and the historical
context (the Cold War in particular) has altered, the governments of ‘developing’
nations around the world can still benefit from an examination of the HPAEs as a
way of finding ‘their own best starting points’.63
In the wider context of the ‘discovery’ of the state in East Asia, which is apparent
in works such as The Key to the Asian Miracle, the process of liberal revisionism
begun in the Bank’ s original Miracle report, has been more completely realised
in The State in a Changing World, published with much fanfare in 1997.64 Indeed,
so significant a departure is this report from the organisation’ s earlier position,
that it provides an obvious marker of the ongoing reinvention of liberalism in
which the Bank has played an important role. The State in a Changing World was
not simply a product of the rising economic, and therefore political, influence of
the developmental states of East Asia, it was also made possible by the
transformation of the international political economy itself. As has already been
suggested, the dominance of capitalism as the unchallenged - by rival systemic
paradigms, at least - form of global economic organisation, profoundly altered the
situation in which debates about economic development occurred. Given that it
was no longer necessary to justify capitalist organisation in opposition to a rival
economic system, it was, perhaps, inevitable that capitalism, or more precisely
alternative models of capitalism, would be the subject of greater examination at
the same time as it was possible in the post-cold war era to give greater credit to
the different type(s) of capitalism which had been so successful in East Asia.65
In this context The State in a Changing World is a noteworthy and revealing
example of the Bank’ s shifting position on the role of the state. Indeed, the entire
report is premised on the idea that the state is not simply a necessarily important
determinant of national economic welfare, but that ‘its capability - defined as the
ability to undertake and promote collective actions efficiently - must be
increased’.66 Clearly, this bears the hallmarks of an extremely influential strand of
predominantly North American theoretical literature centred on rational choice
economics and the increasingly prominent position of institutional theory.67 What
is of more general significance, however, is that although much of this literature
still carries the same sort of commitment to market-determined economic
outcomes as does neoclassical economics, the report’ s recognition of the
potential efficacy of state intervention marks a significant departure from its
previous position and an overt recognition of the role of government ‘intervention’
in the rise of East Asia.
Although the report is at pains to describe the actions of Japan and the East
Asian states more generally as ‘market enhancing’ , it also clearly concedes that
states are fundamentally implicated in defining the structure of market-mediated
economic relations.68 In other words, ‘intervention’ per se is not necessarily a
problem. Indeed, ‘development without an effective state is impossible’ according
to the report.69 East Asia assumes a particular significance in this regard as it
‘shows how government and the private sector can cooperate to achieve rapid
growth and shared development’.70 What this amounts to is an - albeit heavily
qualified - endorsement of the ‘Asian way’ of managing government-business
relations in particular and the process of development more generally. For the
late-industrialising nations of East Asia, and by implication for their counterparts
in the rest of the so-called ‘developing world’, the report concludes that the state
is capable of ‘not merely laying the foundations of industrial development but
actually accelerating it’,71 At the same time, the World Bank’ s 1997 report
defines an ‘effective state’ in a way which bypasses the wider social context and
the social impact of the developmental states in the region. Not surprisingly, as
with Campos’ and Roots’ 1996 study, the conception of an effective state in East
Asia presented in The State in a Changing World is grounded in an elite-centred
approach to political and economic change which implicitly, if not explicitly,
endorses authoritarianism.72
Nevertheless, The State in a Changing World represents something of a
watershed for the Bank and reflects a shift in neoliberalism the significance of
which is not yet clear. While the type of development knowledge produced by the
World Bank has been influenced by a growing literature on the importance and
role of institutions, it is also clearly influenced by wider forces in the international
political economy. The direct and increasing influence of the Japanese
government on the one hand, and what had until recently been the remarkable
rise of East Asia more generally on the other, has clearly been reflected in the
type of development knowledge produced at the Bank. The crucial question for
the future, however, is whether this new-found enthusiasm for the state will
survive the sudden collapse of the region into economic chaos. The history of the
Bank has demonstrated that its position is likely to be determined by the shifting
contours of the international political economy of which it is an integral part. The
dominant economic discourse on the regional crisis attributes the apparent fall of
East Asia to precisely the sorts of ‘cooperative, relations between business and
government that the World Bank had so recently begun to endorse.73 Rather than
being seen as a source of effective planning and economic development, the
governments of East Asia are now routinely associated with cronyism, corruption
and inefficiency.
Ironically, having brought itself to concede that ‘the state’ (albeit a generally
abstract and nonspecific one) can play a critical role in accelerating development,
the Bank is now faced with the prospect of seeing this model become
increasingly discredited. This does not mean, however, that the Bank’ s position
will simply revert to the model of development, and the free-trade understanding
of the East Asian trajectory, it championed in the early 1980s. Significantly,
during the current crisis there has been a marked divergence between the
approach taken by the Bank and that of its sibling, the IMF, which has taken a
much more prominent role in attempts to manage the crisis.74 While these
differences should not be exaggerated, and there is no suggestion that the Bank
is not supportive of the general trend towards market-orientated reform and the
pursuit of more ‘transparent’ economic relations in the region, nevertheless, the
Bank has questioned the IMF approach. The standard IMF crisis-management
toolkit of fiscal stringency, reduced spending and the like, has caused massive
social dislocation, of which the Bank - or more accurately, its current president,
James Wolfensohn - has been a significant critic.75 It is important not to read too
much into the actions of one individual, no matter how senior in the Bank
hierarchy, but Wolfensohn has also been an outspoken critic both of the way the
Bank itself has operated and of its alienation from those whom it is supposedly
intended to help. However, given the Bank’ s track record, we should be sceptical
about the latest president’ s rhetoric of ‘people first’.76 In the short term
Wolfensohn may have given the Bank’ s senior managers a shock, by forcing
them actually to go into the field and examine the impact of the Bank’ s policies
and prescriptions, for example.77 But it is extremely doubtful that such measures
will alter the overall path of an organisation like the World Bank, which is
profoundly implicated in the technocratic and elitist conception of development
that remains the dominant international approach to development on the eve of
the new millennium.
Conclusion: lineages of liberalism and miracles of modernisation
The 1997 crisis in East Asia has seriously undermined the region’ s credentials
as the site of an economic miracle and has had a dramatic impact on the postcold war international political economy. As with the end of the Cold War, the end
of the East Asian miracle has precipitated important changes in the contours of
global capitalism. And as with the end of the Cold War, the possible end, or
stalling of the East Asian miracle will undoubtedly lead to a great deal of
revisionism on the part of those who had previously seen it as a potentially
universal key to economic development. Between the 1970s and the second half
of the 1990s the debate about the causes of, and the lessons which can be
extracted from, the successful industrialisation of a growing number of countries
in Northeast and Southeast Asia occupied a key position in the wider
international development debate. During this period some of the most influential
interpretations of East Asian industrialisation, which represented the East Asian
trajectory as a miracle of modernisation, were linked to the wider rise of
neoliberalism in this period. This was readily apparent in the interpretation of the
East Asian miracle specifically, and capitalist development more generally,
offered by the World Bank, arguably the most prestigious and one of the most
powerful producers of international development knowledge. Taking the dramatic
events of 1997 as a crucial turning point, this article has provided a brief
overview of the relationship between Anglo-American liberalism and East Asian
dynamism over the past 30 years or so. Ultimately, it was emphasised that, in the
context of the shifting contours of the international political economy and
important changes to the dominant international discourse on development, the
World Bank played a crucial role in domesticating the East Asian Miracle to the
dominant liberal narrative of progress and in facilitating the wider reinvention of
liberalism in the post-1945 period.
Notes
Part of the research for this article was supported by the Asia Research Centre at Murdoch
University (Perth, Western Australia). We also thank Anthony Aspden for research assistance.
Any errors of fact or interpretation are our responsibility.
1 Critics often provide a relatively fixed conception of the type of development model being
promoted by both the World Bank and the ‘West’ more generally. For example, see A Escobar,
Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World, Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1995, p 224. For a discussion of Escobar’ s book see M T Berger,
‘Post-cold war capitalism: modernization and modes of resistance after the fall’ Third World
Quarterly, 16(4), December, 1995, pp 717-728.
2 Central to the shifting liberal narrative of international progress are assumptions about the
sanctity of private property, the superiority of gradual or evolutionary political, economic and
social change, the equation of democracy with elections and parliamentary government, and the
assumption that free trade (laissez faire) is a superior mode of economic activity and
organisation. Of course, the relative emphasis which has been placed on free trade, and the
actual implementation of laissez faire policies have fluctuated dramatically over
time. As Immanuel Wallerstein has noted ‘not only is the capitalist system not properly described
as a system of free enterprise today, but there never was a moment in history when this was a
reasonably descriptive label. The capitalist system is and always has been one of state
interference with the ‘freedom’
of the market in the interests of some and against those of others.’ ‘Capitalists seek to maximize
profit on the world markets, utilizing whenever it is profitable, and whenever they are able to
create them, legal monopolies and/or other forms of constraints of trade.’ I Wallerstein, The
Capitalist World Economy, London: Cambridge University Press, 1980, pp 121, 149. See also O
Handlin, Truth in History, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979, pp 181, 189-192.
3 R Gilpin, The Political Economy of International Relations, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1987.
4 E Hobsbawm, Goodbye to all that’ , in R Blackburn (ed), After the Fall: The Failure of
Communism and the Future of Socialism, London: Verso, 1991, pp 115-125.
5 G J Ikenberry, ‘A world economy restored: expert consensus and the Anglo-American post-war
settlement’, International Organization, 46(1), 1992, pp 289-321.
6 J G Ruggie, ‘International regimes, transactions, and change: embedded liberalism in the
postwar economic order’, International Organization 36(2), 1982, pp 379-415.
7 M J Hogan, The Marshall Plan: America, Britain, and the Reconstruction of Western Europe,
1947- 1952, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
8 J R Benjamin, ‘The framework of US relations with Latin America in the twentieth century: an
interpretive essay’ , Diplomatic History, 11(2), 1987, p 107. As Robert Packenham has argued,
the Alliance for Progress represented one of ‘the most sustained’ and explicit’ efforts to bring
‘democracy’ to the ‘Third World’ .
According to Packenham, President Kennedy was convinced that ‘economic and social progress’
under the leadership of the USA would dramatically increase the possibility of North Americanstyle political and economic patterns taking root in Latin America and beyond. R A Packenham,
Liberal America and the Third
World: Political Development Ideas in Foreign Aid and Social Science, Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1973, pp 69-70. See also M T Berger, Under Northern Eyes: Latin American
Studies and US Hegemony in the Americas, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995, pp
66-97.
9 R S McNamara, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, New York: Vintage,
1996.
10 Packenham, Liberal America and the Third World, pp 52-53; and I L Horowitz, Beyond Empire
and Revolution: Militarization and Consolidation in the Third World, New York: Oxford University
Press, 1982, pp 76-77.
11 D Morawetz, Twenty-Five Years of Economic Development 1950- 1975, Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins University Press for the World Bank, 1977.
12 World Bank, World Development Report 1980, Washington, DC: World Bank, 1980, p 3.
13 For a good background analysis of the move to Structural Adjustment Loans (SALs) and
Sectoral Adjustment Loans (SECALs) see P Mosley, J Harrigan & J Toye, Aid and Power: The
World Bank and Policy-based Lending, London: Routledge, 1991, Vol 1 (Analysis and Policy
Proposals), pp 21-23, 27-61. See also Mosley, Harrigan & Toye, Aid and Power, London:
Routledge, 1991, Vol 2 (Case Studies).
14 J E Cronin, The World The Cold War Made: Order, Chaos and the Return of History, London:
Routledge, 1996, pp 177, 185.
15 C Leys, The Rise and Fall of Development Theory, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press,
1996, p 19.
16 Mahbub ul Haq cited in C Caufield, Masters of Illusion: The World Bank and the Poverty of
Nations, New York: Henry Holt, 1996, pp 144, 178.
17 Mosley, Harrigan & Toye, Aid and Power, Vol 1, pp 22-23.
18 World Bank, Accelerated Development in Sub-Saharan Africa: An Agenda for Action,
Washington, DC: World Bank, 1981.
19 Mosley, Harrigan & Toye, Aid and Power, Vol 1, pp 23-24.
20 Caufi eld, Masters of Illusion, pp 144-145.
21 Mosley, Harrigan & Toye, Aid and Power, Vol 1, p 24.
22 R Wade, ‘Japan, the World Bank, and the art of paradigm maintenance: the East Asian
miracle in political perspective’ , New Left Review, 217, 1996, p 5.
23 World Bank, World Development Report 1991: The Challenge of Development, Washington,
DC: World Bank, 1991.
24 Caufield, Masters of Illusion, pp 178-180, 266.
25 Mosley, Harrigan & Toye, Aid and Power, Vol 1, pp 24-25.
26 A Dirlik, After the Revolution: Waking to Global Capitalism, Hanover: Wesleyan University
Press, 1994, p 44. Before 1997 narratives on the distinctiveness of Asian capitalism(s) had also
begun to emerge as significant challengers to Anglo-American conceptions of capitalist
development. M T Berger, Yellow mythologies: the East Asian miracle and post-cold war
capitalism’ , Positions: EastAsia Cultures Critique, 4(1), 1996 (revised and reprinted as M T
Berger, ‘The triumph of the East? The East Asian miracle and
post-cold war capitalism’ , in M T Berger & D A Borer (eds), The Rise of East Asia: Critical
Visions of the Pacific Century, London: Routledge, 1997, pp 260-287.
27 W Keegan, The Spectre of Capitalism: The Future of the World Economy After the Fall of
Communism, London: Vintage, 1993, p 4.
28 L T Preston (World Bank press release 15 October 1991) cited in B Rich, Mortgaging the
Earth: The World Bank, Environmental Impoverishment and the Crisis of Development, Boston,
MA: Beacon Press, 1994, pp 22-23.
29 S Gill, ‘Globalisation, market civilisation, and disciplinary neo-liberalism’ , Millenium, 24(3),
1995, pp 399-423.
30 M Rupert, Producing Hegemony: The Politics of Mass Production, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995.
31 Wade, ‘Japan, the World Bank, and the art of paradigm maintenance’ , p 5. See also C Payer,
The World Bank: A Critical Analysis, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1982, pp 15-21.
32 Cairncross, cited in Caufield, Masters of Illusion, pp 62-63, 196-197.
33 Caufield, Masters of Illusion, p 197.
34 US official cited in G Kolko, Confronting the Third World: United States Foreign Policy 19451980, New York: Pantheon, 1988, pp 232-236.
35 Wade, Japan, the World Bank, and the art of paradigm maintenance’ , pp 16, 30-31, 35-36.
36 Mosley, Harrigan & Toye, Aid & Power, Vol 1, p 29.
37 Wade, ‘Japan, the World Bank, and the art of paradigm maintenance’ , p 31.
38 M P Todaro, Economic Development in the Third World, New York: Longman, 1989, pp 83-84.
39 B Balassa, The Newly Industrializing Countries in the World Economy, New York: Pergamon
Press, 1981.
40 B Balassa, ‘The lessons of East Asian development: an overview’ , Economic Development
and Cultural Change, 36(3), (supplement), 1988, pp S280-S281, S286-S288.
41 See, for example, H Patrick, ‘The future of the Japanese economy: output and labor
productivity’, Journal of Japanese Studies, 3(2), 1977, p 239. For a similar, but more general
market-centred explanation of East Asian development, see: E K Y Chen, Hyper-growth in Asian
Economies: A Comparative Study of HongKong, Japan, Korea, Singapore and Taiwan, London:
Macmillan, 1979.
42 A pioneering text in the Anglo-American revisionist tradition is C Johnson, MITI and the
Japanese Miracle: The Growth of Industry Policy 1925- 1975, Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1992. More recently, and in a more popular and journalistic vein, see J Fallows, Looking at
the Sun: The Rise of the New East Asian Economic and Political System, New York: Pantheon,
1994. For an overview of the literature and the debate see J Henderson & R P Appelbaum,
‘Situating the state in the East Asian development process’ in R P Appelbaum & J Henderson
(eds), State and Development in the Asian Pacific Rim, Newbury Park: Sage, 1992; and S Bell,
‘The collective capitalism of Northeast Asia and the limits of orthodox economics’, Australian
Journal of Political Science, 30, 1995, pp 264-287.
43 E Sakaibara, Beyond Capitalism: The Japanese Model of Market Economics, Lanham, MD:
University Press, 1993; and M Mohamad & S Ishihara, The Voice of Asia: Two Leaders Discuss
the Coming Century, Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1995. For overviews of this literature and
the ‘Asian way’ debate see Berger, ‘The Triumph of the East?’ pp 260-287; D Wright-Neville, ‘The
politics of pan Asianism: culture, capitalism and diplomacy in East Asia’ , Pacifica Review: Peace,
Security and Global Change, 7(1), 1995; and A Dupont, ’ Is there an ‘Asian Way’?, Survival,
38(2), 1996.
44 World Bank, The East Asian Miracle: Economic Growth and Public Policy, Oxford: Oxford
University Press for the World Bank, 1993.
45 Caufield, Masters of Illusion, p 160.
46 Wade, ‘Japan, the World Bank, and the art of paradigm maintenance’ , p 23.
47 For an overview of these disputes, see: L J Schoppa, Bargaining with Japan: What American
Pressure Can and Cannot Do, New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.
48 W Hatch & K Yamamura, Asia in Japan’s Embrace: Building a Regional Production Alliance,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
49 Wade, ‘Japan, the World Bank, and the art of paradigm maintenance’ , pp 6-9.
50 Ibid, p 10.
51 D P Rapkin & J R Strand, ‘The US and Japan in the Bretton Woods institutions: sharing or
contesting leadership?’ , International Journal, LII, 1997, pp 265-296.
52 Cited in Wade, ‘Japan, the World Bank, and the art of paradigm maintenance’, pp 10-11. 53
Cited in P Evans, Embedded Autonomy: States and Industrial Transformation, Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1995, p 21.
54 Wade, ‘Japan, the World Bank, and the art of paradigm maintenance’ , pp 14-17.
55 World Bank, The East Asian Miracle. For an overview and critique of the 1993 report in
relation to Southeast Asia in particular, see J Rigg, 5outheast Asia: The Human Landscape of
Modernization and Development, London: Routledge, 1997, pp 3-10.
56 One of the first and most influential was, World Bank, Sub-Saharan Africa: From Crisis to
Sustainable Growth, Washington: World Bank, 1989.
57 See, World Bank, Managing Development: The Governance Dimension, Washington: World
Bank, 1991.
58 D Williams & T Young, ‘Governance, the World Bank and liberal theory’ , Political Studies,
XLII, 1994, pp 84-100.
59 G J Schmitz, ‘Democratization and demystification: deconstructing ª governanceº as
development paradigm’, in D B Moore & G J Schmitz (eds), Debating Development Discourse:
Institutional and Popular
Perspectives, New York: St Martin’ s Press, 1995, pp 54-90.
60 T Koh, ‘The ten values that undergird East Asian strength and success’ , International Herald
Tribune, 11 December 1993. This is discussed in M T Berger, ‘A new East-West Synthesis?
APEC and competing narratives of regional integration in the post-cold war Asia-Pacific’ ,
Alternatives: Social Transformation and Humane Governance, 23(1), 1998, p 14.
61 J E Campos & H L Root, The Key to the Asian Miracle: Making Shared Growth Credible,
Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 1996, p viii.
62 Ibid, pp. 1-3.
63 Ibid, pp 174-177.
64 World Bank, World Development Report: The State in a Changing World, 1997, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1997.
65 M Beeson, ‘Asia’ s disparate political economies and the prospects for transnational
‘convergence’ , Asian Journal of Public Administration, 18(2), 1996, pp 141-167.
66 World Bank, The State in a Changing World, p 3, emphasis in the original.
67 For an overview of this literature, see M Beeson, ‘The clash of institutions: APEC and
institutional theory, paper presented to the International Studies Association Conference, Toronto,
March 18-22 1997.
68 World Bank, The State in a Changing World, p 6.
69 Ibid, p 24.
70 Ibid, p 46.
71 Ibid, p 61, emphasis added.
72 Everyone’ s State? Redefining an ‘Effective State’ in East Asia, Hong Kong: Asia Monitor
Resource Centre, 1997, pp 6, 24-26.
73 See, for example, P Woodall, ‘Frozen miracle: a survey of East Asian economies’ , The
Economist, 7 March 1998.
74 Of take-offs and tempests’, The Economist, 14 March 1988, p 92.
75 P Alford, ‘World Bank earmarks $445m for Thai safety net’ , The Australian, 2 February 1998,
p 6.
76 J D Wolfensohn, ‘People first’ , Paul Hoffman Lecture, New York, 29 May 1997. Available at ,
http://www.worldbank.org/html/extdr/extme/jwspO529.htm. .
77 R W Stevenson, ‘A chief banker for nations at the bottom of the heap’, New York Times, 14
September 1997.