Corruption: The Boom and Bust of East Asia

Governance andcorruption have finally come to the fore of the development debate.While interest in governance began to surge in the early 1990s, theEast Asian crisis has catapulted the issue to prominence. Analystsand academics in a spate of articles and books, have added theirvoices to the chorus of criticism of the so-called Asian miracle.Their verdict: Bad governance and corruption did the "miracle"countries in.

Taking adifferent perspective, this book asks and attempts to answer howthese countries were able to attract enormous amounts of investmentand enjoy rapid growth over a thirty-year period despite beingperceived as hotbeds of corruption As conventional wisdom would haveit, high rates of investment are inconsistent with high levels ofcorruption. While this may be true in general, the chapters in thisvolume suggest that we need to look into the nature of corruption.Different types of corruption have varying effects on investment.