Money and Power in Provincial Thailand
Money and Power in Provincial Thailand

Author: Ruth McVey

Publisher: University of Hawaii Press

Published: 2001-01-01

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 9780824822736

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Most studies of Southeast Asian economic change focus on the phenomenal growth experienced by a few large cities, such as Jakarta, Bangkok, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, and Singapore. Big business has been viewed as the economic engine fueling the region's growth and prosperity. Studies of the rural areas have concerned themselves with the social and environmental impact of metropolitan growth--villages emptied by migration to the big cities, cultures crushed by tourist development, and agribusiness and lush landscapes destroyed by the devastation of natural resources. The literature reveals that few analysts have examined the middle distance between metropolis and countryside. The contributors to this book have addressed the issue by concentrating on the intermediate level of economic, political, and social life--the world of Thailand's provincial cities and market towns. In the past decade the rise of frequently violent competition for business and political leadership in the Thai provinces, and the growing importance of provincial support for national powerholders, has drawn attention to the way in which these town and village centers are being transformed by capitalist development. This volume brings together some of the research inspired by this, drawing on a variety of disciplinary approaches, national backgrounds, and sites of study. Contributors: Daniel Arghiros, Chris Baker, Sombat Chantornvong, Kevin Hewison, Jim LoGerfo, Ruth McVey, Michael J. Montesano, James Ockey, Pasuk Phongpaichit, Maniemai Thongyou, Yoko Ueda.

Money and Power in Provincial Thailand
Money and Power in Provincial Thailand

Author: Ruth Thomas McVey

Publisher: NIAS Press

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 9788787062701

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During the 1990s, the Thai provinces saw the rise of a frequently violent competition for business and political leadership. This examination of economic change focuses on this middle ground between metropolis and countryside, an arena being transformed by capitalist development.

Political Booms: Local Money And Power In Taiwan, East China, Thailand, And The Philippines
Political Booms: Local Money And Power In Taiwan, East China, Thailand, And The Philippines

Author: Lynn T White

Publisher: World Scientific

Published: 2009-06-10

Total Pages: 748

ISBN-13: 9814469319

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Why have Taiwan, rich parts of China, and Thailand boomed famously, while the Philippines has long remained stagnant both economically and politically? Do booms abet democracy? Does the rise of middle “classes” promise future liberalization? Why has Philippine democracy brought no boom and barely served the Filipino people?This book, unlike most previous studies, shows that both the roots and results of growth are largely political rather than economic. Specifically, it pays attention to local, not just national, power networks that caused or prevented growth in the four places under consideration. Violence has been common in these polities, along with money. Elections have contributed to socio-political problems that are also obvious in Leninist or junta regimes, because elections are surprisingly easy to buy with corrupt money from government contracts. Liberals should pay more serious theoretical attention to the effects of money on justice, and Western political science should focus more clearly on the ways non-state local power affects elections. By considering the effects on fair justice of local money and power (largely from small- and medium-sized firms that emerge after agrarian reforms), this book asks democrats to face squarely the extent to which electoral procedures fail to help ordinary citizens. Students and scholars of Asia will all need this book — as will students of the West whose methods have become parochial.

Business, Government and Labor
Business, Government and Labor

Author: Linda Y C Lim

Publisher: World Scientific

Published: 2017-12-07

Total Pages: 422

ISBN-13: 9813225254

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Business, Government and Labor in the Economic Development of Singapore and Southeast Asia analyzes the inter-linked and evolving roles of private sector business, government public policy, and labor markets in the economic development of Singapore and its Southeast Asian neighborhood. It does this through 16 essays written by Prof. Linda Y C Lim, an early and long-established scholar of these subjects, and published over a 35-year period. For Singapore, often considered the world's most successful economy, the essays highlight the determining role of government's industrial and social policy through to the present day, when the growth model of the past faces many external market and domestic resource constraints. In the rest of Southeast Asia, in contrast, the essays explore how private sector business, dominated by the locally-domiciled ethnic Chinese minority, thrived and drove economic growth in underdeveloped markets with imperfect institutions, and consider if and how this might change with China's increasing presence in the regional economy. A final set of essays analyzes the forces underlying women's employment, from labor-intensive Southeast Asian export factories in the 1980s to Singapore's foreign-labor-dependent economy and its current productivity challenges. Taken together, the essays show how government, business and labor interact in the process of economic development.

Democracy, Development and Decentralization in Provincial Thailand
Democracy, Development and Decentralization in Provincial Thailand

Author: Daniel Arghiros

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-05-06

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 1136861742

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This definitive study of electoral politics and democratic decentralization in provincial Thailand investigates how democracy is unfolding in the context of emergent capitalism, exploring the relationships between the politics of the locality, the province and the nation from 1950.

Power Broking In The Shade: Party Finances And Money Politics In Southeast Asia
Power Broking In The Shade: Party Finances And Money Politics In Southeast Asia

Author: Wolfgang Sachsenroder

Publisher: World Scientific

Published: 2018-06-04

Total Pages: 202

ISBN-13: 9813230754

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'The book offers a broad survey of political parties’ financing strategies in Southeast Asia.'Contemporary Southeast AsiaPolitical activities, the running of party organisations, branches and headquarters, and especially election campaigns, are becoming increasingly costly, and no party can survive without money. Political power provides access to funding from public and private sources. Political parties have become more and more like businesses, including the temptation to maximise the income and the war chests, thus opening the doors for vested interests and influence peddling. As a result, money politics is pervasive, and the public is becoming increasingly critical of it. Trust in political parties, politicians, governments, and key state institutions has fallen to unprecedented levels. In most countries in the region general and political corruption, graft, and influence peddling are all too visible for the voters, while good governance remains an ideal too often out of reach.This book, Power Broking in the Shade: Party Finances and Money Politics in Southeast Asia, provides an overview of the strategies for financial survival of the parties in the region and the importance of stable cash flows for their political success. The book fills the void of a comparative approach towards party financing that covers the whole of ASEAN and offers accessible facts and understandable analysis for anyone interested in the politics of Southeast Asia.

Unequal Thailand
Unequal Thailand

Author: Pasuk Phongpaichit

Publisher: NUS Press

Published: 2015-11-05

Total Pages: 205

ISBN-13: 9814722006

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Extreme inequalities in income,wealth and power lie behind Thailand’s political turmoil. What are the sources of this inequality? Why does it persist, or even increase when the economy grows? How can it be addressed? The contributors to this important study—Thai scholars, reformers and civil servants—shed light on the many dimensions of inequality in Thailand, looking beyond simple income measures to consider land ownership, education, finance, business structures and politics. The contributors propose a series of reforms in taxation, spending and institutional reform that can address growing inequality. Inequality is among the biggest threats to social stability in Southeast Asia, and this close study of a key Southeast Asian country will be relevant to regional policy-makers, economists and business decision-makers, as well as students of oligarchy and inequality more generally.

Thailand’s Political Peasants
Thailand’s Political Peasants

Author: Andrew Walker

Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres

Published: 2012-08-06

Total Pages: 294

ISBN-13: 0299288234

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When a populist movement elected Thaksin Shinawatra as prime minister of Thailand in 2001, many of the country’s urban elite dismissed the outcome as just another symptom of rural corruption, a traditional patronage system dominated by local strongmen pressuring their neighbors through political bullying and vote-buying. In Thailand’s Political Peasants, however, Andrew Walker argues that the emergence of an entirely new socioeconomic dynamic has dramatically changed the relations of Thai peasants with the state, making them a political force to be reckoned with. Whereas their ancestors focused on subsistence, this generation of middle-income peasants seeks productive relationships with sources of state power, produces cash crops, and derives additional income through non-agricultural work. In the increasingly decentralized, disaggregated country, rural villagers and farmers have themselves become entrepreneurs and agents of the state at the local level, while the state has changed from an extractor of taxes to a supplier of subsidies and a patron of development projects. Thailand’s Political Peasants provides an original, provocative analysis that encourages an ethnographic rethinking of rural politics in rapidly developing countries. Drawing on six years of fieldwork in Ban Tiam, a rural village in northern Thailand, Walker shows how analyses of peasant politics that focus primarily on rebellion, resistance, and evasion are becoming less useful for understanding emergent forms of political society.

Cultural Governance and Resistance in Pacific Asia
Cultural Governance and Resistance in Pacific Asia

Author: William A. Callahan

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2006-05-03

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 1134203675

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This text examines the politics of culture and the culture of politics in Pacific Asia through case studies on the South Pacific, China, South Korea, Thailand and Southeast Asia. The contexts and cultures of the chapters are wide-ranging and Callahan skilfully ties them together with the objective of analyzing the relation between the state’s cultural governance and resistance to it. The themes covered include: governmentality and cultural production popular culture and resistance East/West relations gender, identity and democracy civil society, social movements and democracy national and transnational identity production. Cultural Governance and Resistance in Pacific Asia addresses the dynamics between Asian studies and cultural studies, and the overlap between comparative politics and international relations, and as such will appeal to students and scholars of Asian studies, cultural studies, comparative politics, sociology and anthropology alike.