The Effects of the Financial Crisis in the Mature Asian Nics: “Enterprise Association” and its Modifications

Abstract

The Asian financial crisis can be attributed in part to the “enterprise association” model of governance pursued in East and Southeast Asia. As a consequence, business has served governmentally defined ends, the independence of the social sphere has been stymied, and autonomous legal institutions have been slow to develop. Although this model has conditioned important policies pursued in Singapore and Taiwan, other influences have mitigated - though unintentionally - its worst effects. In Singapore, the elites have seen the importance for international financial credibility of the rule of law as it applies in many areas of commerce; the desire to limit for political ends the development of a powerful local bourgeoisie has encouraged it to keep the country particularly open to the activities of trans-national corporations. In Taiwan, the division (before the mid 1980s) of politics and business which reflected the divide between “mainlanders” and “Taiwanese”, and the institutionalised resourcing of the ruli...