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Book Launch

The Connections World: The Future of Asian Capitalism

Asia’s development model mixing industrial policy with a common reliance on large and powerful business groups has helped solve many of the problems of economic development through coordination. The business groups use close and highly transactional connections with politicians for their benefit.  Not only does the resulting economic firepower of these business groups allow them to dominate the various markets in which they operate, but it also allows them to achieve significant scale relative to the economy as a whole. This has been matched by a parallel and rapid accumulation and concentration of wealth. In our recent book, we call this the Connections World. [Simon Commander and Saul Estrin, The Connections World: The Future of Modern Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2022]. Although it has, for the most part, supported Asia’s extraordinary growth, problems with this model, and the configuration of economic and political power that it has enabled, are mounting. Demographics challenge reliance on extensive growth while the attenuation of competition holds back productivity growth, limits the number of high-quality jobs and, most significantly, stands in the way of a shift to greater reliance on innovation. New policies for corporate governance, taxation and the design of competition policy will be needed. 
Conference Room,
Oei Tiong Ham Building,
Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy,
469C Bukit Timah Road Singapore 259772
Fri 14 April 2023
05:15 PM - 06:30 PM

Prof. Simon Commander

Prof. Simon Commander

Managing Partner, Altura Partners and Visiting Professor of Economics at IE Business School

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Prof. Danny Quah

Prof. Danny Quah

Dean and Li Ka Shing Professor in Economics, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy

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