IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/mjr/journl/v61y2024i2p291-307.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Political Leadership Matters: The Case of Four Successful East Asian Economies

Author

Listed:
  • Kiong-hock Lee

    (Faculty of Business and Economics, Universiti Malaya)

  • Shyamala Nagaraj

    (Center for Political Studies, University of Michigan)

Abstract

Out of the thirteen economies that registered sustained rapid economic growth in the post-war period, only six successfully transitioned into high-income econ-omies. Malaysia did not make the cut. The Commission on Growth and Development (CGD) identified credible leadership as a key factor behind the success of the six economies, but it had very little to say about the individual political leaders. This paper fills the gap by allowing the political leaders and their adroitness to speak for them. In particular, we focus on the mindset, acumen and demeanour of the key political leaders in building social capabilities that are crucial to rapid economic growth and development. We find that key political leaders like Okubo Toshimichi of Japan, Park Chung Hee of South Korea, Chiang Kai Shek of Taiwan and Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore rose to the external, existential threats to their peoples and paved the way for them to catch up with the developed economies by displaying and practising the mindset and behaviours of the class of transformational leadership.

Suggested Citation

  • Kiong-hock Lee & Shyamala Nagaraj, 2024. "Political Leadership Matters: The Case of Four Successful East Asian Economies," Malaysian Journal of Economic Studies, Faculty of Business and Economics, University of Malaya & Malaysian Economic Association, vol. 61(2), pages 291-307, December.
    • Handle: RePEc:mjr:journl:v:61:y:2024:i:2:p:291-307
    DOI: 10.22452/MJES.vol61no2.5
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Economic growth; transformational political leadership; social capabilities;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • O43 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Growth and Aggregate Productivity - - - Institutions and Growth
    • D72 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior
    • D73 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Bureaucracy; Administrative Processes in Public Organizations; Corruption
    • E02 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - General - - - Institutions and the Macroeconomy

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:mjr:journl:v:61:y:2024:i:2:p:291-307. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Malaysian Economic Association (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/pemmmea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.