Author Description

Comparisons of East Asian and Latin American development frequently attribute the success of the former and the failure of the latter to differences in policies and institutions. Political Conflict and Development in East Asia and Latin America takes issue with such a view by subjecting the conventional policy and institutional attributes to vigorous case-to-case comparison across the two regions. The analysis in this book rests upon a chain of reasoning which starts with policy, argues back to the institutions that shape policy, and then to the forces that fashion the institutions. This last link in the chain is conspicuously absent in the literature but is critical to our understanding. The book shows how the range of institutions associated with development in East Asia and Latin America are deeply rooted in particular economic political and social settings that govern how they work. The book directly challenges the dominant view that development can be reduced to a formula or a set ofinstitutions that can be copied by other countries to guarantee successful development. Its emphasis upon institutional fashioning will be a distinctive contribution to development studies.