Professor Emeritus Teresa Encarnacion Tadem recently published an article on “Asian Politics and Technocrats” in the Oxford Research Encyclopedias.
The abstract reads:
The expansion of capitalist development gave impetus to the emergence of technocracy in Western industrial societies, and this was transported, mainly through the United States, into the Asian region during the advent of the Cold War. A major concern was to strengthen the economies of the these less-developed countries under the rubric of modernization, which stressed liberalization, free trade, and the free market as mainly espoused by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
Technocratic policymaking in Asia, with the exception of Japan, would occur under the auspices of a developmental authoritarian state that produced two diverse trajectories. In East Asian states, these became highly successful, newly industrializing countries compared to their Southeast Asian counterparts because (a) more U.S. military and economic assistance was given to the former due to geopolitical reasons, and (b) the East Asian states had more at stake compared to the Southeast Asian countries because of security concerns and scarce resources. Because of this, policymaking in the latter was more susceptible to the adverse effects of elite politics and domestic and external economic crises in their transitioning from authoritarianism to “democracy.” The 1997–1998 Asian financial crisis also called into question the sustainability and feasibility of the East Asian Model of development.
Access the article here: https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.013.2133