AA
Asia and the Pacific
Political economy and political history of China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Southeast Asia, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Australia and New Zealand.
114 books on Asia and the Pacific, 4 of them tier 1, recommended by 20 people including Mohnish Pabrai and Patrick Collison.
114 books · 29 experts
Start here
- The Lucky CountryDonald Horne, 1964
- MITI and the Japanese MiracleChalmers A. Johnson, 1982
- Governing the MarketRobert Wade, 1990
- From Third World to FirstLee Kuan Yew, 2000
- Japan as Number OneEzra F. Vogel, 1979
The best books on Asia and the Pacific 114
Donald Horne · 1964
The complacency critique that named the national economic problem.
Chalmers A. Johnson · 1982
The founding text on the developmental state and industrial policy.
Robert Wade · 1990
The canonical study of Taiwanese industrial policy and state-led investment.
Lee Kuan Yew · 2000
The founder's own account of how the development strategy was chosen.
Ezra F. Vogel · 1979
The high-water mark of Western awe, useful now as a study in extrapolation.
World Bank · 1993
The official pre-crisis interpretation; read alongside Studwell to see what it missed.
Adam Fforde, Stefan de Vylder · 1996
The canonical doi moi study; reform as bottom-up fence-breaking, not decree.
Edmund Terence Gomez, Jomo K. S. · 1997
The canonical mapping of party-linked ownership across corporate Malaysia.
Lee Kuan Yew · 1998
The first volume of the memoirs, covering independence and the early state.
Ishrat Husain · 1999
By a later central bank governor; the structural diagnosis that still holds.
Gurcharan Das · 2000
A Procter & Gamble insider on the 1991 liberalisation and what preceded it.
David C. Kang · 2002
Why the same corruption produced growth in Korea and stagnation here.
Joe Studwell · 2002
The recurring foreign delusion about the size of the China opportunity.
Alice H. Amsden, Wan-wen Chu · 2003
How Taiwan moved from imitation to scale in electronics and chips.
Paul M. Handley · 2006
The monarchy and the Crown Property Bureau as an economic institution.
Joe Studwell · 2007
Places Li inside the Hong Kong and Southeast Asian tycoon system.
Edward Luce · 2007
The political economy behind the growth story, by an FT Delhi bureau chief.
Recommended byMohnish Pabrai
Anatol Lieven · 2011
Kinship networks, patronage and why the state is weaker and more durable than it looks.
Carl E. Walter, Fraser J. T. Howie · 2011
How the state banks, bond market and IPO machine are actually wired.
Byung-Kook Kim, Ezra F. Vogel · 2011
The authoritative volume on how the developmental state was built.
George Megalogenis · 2012
How deregulation from 1983 produced three decades without recession.
Joe Studwell · 2013
The state-directed export discipline that produced the Korean chaebol.
“it's a good read for anyone who wants to understand what actually determines whether a developing economy will succeed.”Bill Gates
Nicholas R. Lardy · 2014
The case that private firms drove the growth miracle.
Ayesha Jalal · 2014
Why the security state crowded out the productive economy from the start.
Henry M. Paulson · 2015
Former Treasury secretary on negotiating with China's state and firms
Arthur R. Kroeber · 2016
The best single-volume orientation for a newcomer to the market.
Neil Monnery · 2017
Cowperthwaite and the fiscal rules that produced the low-tax model.
Tom Wright, Bradley Hope · 2018
The 1MDB looting, and the banks, auditors and funds that waved it through.
James Crabtree · 2018
Crony capitalism, promoter leverage and the bad-loan crisis.
Nicholas R. Lardy · 2019
The same author documenting the reversal towards state control.
Ulrike Schaede · 2020
Why Japanese firms retreated into high-margin upstream components.
T2 Red Roulette
Desmond Shum · 2021
Insider account of doing deals through Party patronage, and losing everything.
Patrick McGee · 2025
What Apple actually built by renting other people's factories for two decades.
“This is a phenomenal read... A brilliantly researched book. This book was hard to put down.”Christopher Bloomstran
Recommended byChristopher Bloomstran
Mahathir bin Mohamad · 1970
Insider primary source: the argument that became the New Economic Policy and Bumiputera quotas.
Just Faaland, J. R. Parkinson · 1976
The founding pessimist study; useful baseline for what was later beaten.
Sterling Seagrave · 1988
Journalistic account of how the crony monopolies and offshore holdings were built.
Alfred W. McCoy · 1993
The provincial dynasties behind the listed conglomerates; still the reference on ownership.
Roger Douglas · 1993
Insider case for the reforms by the finance minister who forced them through.
Pasuk Phongpaichit, Sungsidh Piriyarangsan · 1994
Field research on how money actually moves through Thai officialdom.
Pasuk Phongpaichit, Chris Baker · 1995
The pre-crisis baseline: how the boom economy was actually structured.
Brian Easton · 1996
The post-war economy through the liberalisation, by its best chronicler.
Jonathan Boston, John Martin, June Pallot, Pat Walsh · 1996
The state-sector redesign other governments copied; contracts, outputs, accountability.
Eun Mee Kim · 1997
The state-chaebol bargain and how it shifted over forty years.
Paul D. Hutchcroft · 1998
Why oligarch families captured the banks rather than the state capturing business.
Pasuk Phongpaichit, Chris Baker · 1998
The definitive account of the bubble and the baht devaluation that started the Asian crisis.
Michael Backman · 1999
Written straight after the 1997 crisis on opacity, related-party dealing and family control.
Pasuk Phongpaichit, Chris Baker · 2000
Follow-up on the IMF programme, bank restructuring and who paid for it.
R. E. Elson · 2001
The New Order's patronage economy, on which much of the corporate map rests.
Jomo K. S. · 2001
The 1997-98 crisis and the heterodox capital-control response, analysed properly.
Richard A. Werner · 2003
A contested but influential reading of the Bank of Japan's credit guidance.
Recommended byPatrick Collison
Denny Roy · 2003
Background on the party-state and land reform behind the industrial model.
Shalendra D. Sharma · 2003
Country-by-country anatomy of the crisis, reform and recovery.
Arsenio M. Balisacan, Hal Hill · 2003
The standard economics volume: trade, banking, land and industrial policy.
Duncan McCargo · 2004
Edited essays on state, business and the limits of the reform coalition.
T3 Thaksin
Pasuk Phongpaichit, Chris Baker · 2004
Telecoms billionaire turned prime minister; the clearest study of business-politics fusion in Thailand.
Walden Bello, Herbert Docena, Marissa de Guzman, Mary Lou Malig · 2004
Critical account of liberalisation, debt service and deindustrialisation after Marcos.
Richard Lloyd Parry · 2005
Reporting from the 1997-98 collapse and the fall of Suharto.
Alice Poon · 2005
The clearest short account of how the property oligopoly extracts rent.
Patricio N. Abinales, Donna J. Amoroso · 2005
The standard history of a weak state captured by strong families.
Henri Ghesquiere · 2006
An IMF economist on which policies were actually causal, and which transferable.
Pietro Masina · 2006
Industrial policy and FDI dependence assessed against the East Asian model.
Ayesha Siddiqa · 2007
The army's foundations, land and industrial holdings mapped for the first time.
Leo Goodstadt · 2007
How Hong Kong's banks and bank crises shaped the miracle economy.
Shuja Nawaz · 2008
The army's internal history; essential for reading political risk here.
Bill Hayton · 2010
The standard account of Party control, state firms and the doi moi business environment.
Mahathir bin Mohamad · 2011
Memoir by the architect of the industrial policy and the capital controls.
Maleeha Lodhi · 2011
Practitioner essays on energy, taxation, banking and the reform agenda.
Jothie Rajah · 2012
How law is used instrumentally; important for assessing legal risk.
David W. P. Elliott · 2012
How the Party argued itself into opening the economy and joining WTO.
Andrew MacGregor Marshall · 2014
Succession risk and the political instability that follows it.
George Megalogenis · 2015
Migration and openness as the long-run growth variable.
Linda Lim · 2015
Retrospective essays on the limits of the model and what comes next.
Pasuk Phongpaichit, Chris Baker · 2016
Concentration of wealth, land and market power among a few families.
Michael Vatikiotis · 2017
Regional political economy from a mediator who has worked across it.
Edmund Terence Gomez, Thirshalar Padmanabhan, Norfaryanti Kamaruddin, Sunil Bhalla, Fikri Fisal · 2017
Who actually controls the GLCs that dominate the local market.
Ishrat Husain · 2018
Insider on why Pakistani institutional reform keeps failing at implementation.
Clare Rewcastle Brown · 2018
First-hand account by the journalist who broke the 1MDB story.
T3 Backstage
Montek Singh Ahluwalia · 2019
Insider memoir by the architect of much of the reform programme.
T3 City on Fire
Antony Dapiran · 2020
The 2019 protests and the political-risk repricing that followed.
Recommended byMohnish Pabrai
Li Lu · 1990
Memoir of the Cultural Revolution and Tiananmen; his only English-language book.
Recommended byMohnish Pabrai
Ricardo Manapat · 1991
Hard-to-find catalogue of Marcos-era crony deals; the source everyone else cites.
Recommended byBill Gates
Jane Kelsey · 1995
Hostile to the reforms but the fullest record of what was actually done and in what order.
Stéphanie Balme, Mark Sidel · 2006
Legal and institutional reform; the contract and property environment for investors.
Recommended byPatrick Collison
Recommended byMohnish Pabrai
David Lewis · 2011
The one readable overview of how the state, NGOs and business interlock.
Tai-chun Kuo, Ramon H. Myers · 2011
The policy record of the transition from agriculture to electronics.
Recommended byMohnish Pabrai
Xiaobo Liu, Perry Link, Tienchi Martin-Liao · 2012
Recommended byMohnish Pabrai
Recommended byMohnish Pabrai
Recommended byCatriona Wallace
Recommended byPatrick Collison
Recommended byBalaji S. Srinivasan
Recommended byTim Ferriss
Recommended byMohnish Pabrai
Recommended byMohnish Pabrai
Recommended bySahil Lavingia
Recommended byPatrick Collison
unverified
Recommended byPatrick Collison
Recommended byMohnish Pabrai
Experts 29
The people who wrote this page's books, and the people who recommend them.
Authors 9
PP
Pasuk Phongpaichitwrote 6 books hereCB
Chris Bakerwrote 5 books hereJS
Joe Studwellwrote 3 books here
Mahatma Gandhiwrote 3 books here
Lee Kuan Yewwrote 2 books here
Michael E. Porterwrote 1 book here
Michael Lewiswrote 1 book hereLL
Li Luwrote 1 book here
Henry Kissingerwrote 1 book hereRecommenders 20
MP
Mohnish Pabrairecommends 16 books here
Patrick Collisonrecommends 7 books hereBS
Balaji S. Srinivasanrecommends 4 books here
Bill Gatesrecommends 4 books hereAP
Anthony Pomplianorecommends 2 books here
Tim Cookrecommends 2 books hereMM
Michael Mauboussinrecommends 1 book hereKK
Kevin Kellyrecommends 1 book hereMH
Morgan Houselrecommends 1 book here
Alexis Ohanianrecommends 1 book here
Alfred Linrecommends 1 book hereCW
Catriona Wallacerecommends 1 book hereShow all 20
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