Family Business Groups and Economic Development in Southeast Asia

Large private enterprises in the ASEAN-5 economies have been, and remain, dominated by firms that share four common characteristics: (1) their ownership and control are concentrated among a handful of prominent business families; (2) most of these families have Chinese origins; (3) each family owns a collection of legally distinct firms that collectively form a business group; and (4) the owning families have formed extensive connections with politicians and bureaucrats. These characteristics reflect how family businesses have responded to the changing political and economic situations in the region over the past century — the process that shapes the landscape of the modern corporate sector in the ASEAN-5 economies that we observe today.