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The conclusion returns to the key research queries set out in the ‘Introduction’ and provides a tighter and more focused explanatory account of institutional variations and changes in East Asian capitalism. It first uses the typology of East Asian capitalism developed in the ‘Introduction’ to identify the main changes and continuities in the business, financial, and labour institutions that the East Asian political economies have experienced since the late 1980s. The concluding chapter then reassesses the alternative conceptions and causal propositions of dynamic change in contemporary capitalism discussed in the ‘Introduction’ and fleshes out these conceptions and propositions by drawing upon the contributions to this volume. It explores the wider implications of this analysis for the debate about the nature and causes of institutional change. Finally, it concludes by exploring the implications of the main findings of the study for future research on capitalist development in East Asia and beyond.

The introductory chapter sets the general backdrop against which the central analytical objectives of the volume are defined and its major contributions to theoretical debates specified. It interrogates leading theories of comparative capitalism in general and the VoC approach in particular to firmly situate the themes of the volume within recent conceptual and empirical discussions about capitalist development and establish an analytical framework for the whole study. Furthermore, drawing on the governance-centred literature that emphasizes the causal importance of political power in shaping capitalist institutions, this chapter develops a typology of East Asian capitalism against which the individual contributions set their empirical analyses of the institutional variations and changes of national capitalism since the late 1980s. Finally, the chapter illustrates empirically observable modes of institutional changes in national capitalisms and explores the value of causal propositions that centre on state action, political coalitions, and policy discourses.

Financial development in the emerging economies of Southeast Asia varies substantially. These differences have persisted for decades, despite broadly similar policy reforms since the 1980s. This chapter surveys the history of financial development in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand in order to explain the origins of cross-national variation in patterns of financial development as well as the changes in national financial systems in Southeast Asia since the late 1980s. Drawing attention to the political origins of financial policy, the chapter makes two central claims. First, variation in the political exigencies facing postcolonial regimes explains the variation in the financial systems that they constructed. Second, common pressures from international financial markets prompted governments to experiment with financial liberalization beginning in the 1980s, but the particular configurations of political and economic power in each country have shaped how these experiments have played out in terms of actual institutional and regulatory changes.

This chapter retells the story of Spain’s and Korea’s upgrading from the perspective of state–firm coordination. The larger purpose is to showcase the book’s argument and its explanatory power. The chapter consists of six sections. After the chapter’s introduction, section 2.2 situates large Spanish and Korean firms and discusses their limitations. Section 2.3 defines upgrading as a coordination problem and explains why states were necessary for upgrading. Section 2.4 characterizes Spain’s and Korea’s pathways to upgrading and analyzes the factors that led each country to choose a particular strategy. Section 2.5 evaluates the outcomes of upgrading and discusses their broader socioeconomic implications. The final section concludes and makes a transition to the case studies discussed in the next chapters.