A Region of Regimes: Prosperity and Plunder in the Asia-Pacific.

T. J. Pempel, a prominent expert on East Asia, intervenes in current discussions on bipolar geopolitical framing of the Asia-Pacific's current regional tensions in terms of the US-China rivalry. His most recent book, A Region of Regimes, resurfaces heterogeneous economic models and differentiated development as factors informing contemporary regional dynamics. He argues at the outset that “current security frictions, far from being independent from earlier growth experiences, are its intimate by-product” (4). The book surveys the economic trajectories of ten country cases, clustering them into different regimes with different developmental consequences, to better understand the region.Perhaps the greatest contribution of the book is its typology of regimes, which offers a heuristic lens for an expansive analysis of the Asia-Pacific. Pempel's taxonomy also clarifies the broad and indiscriminate usage of developmentalism to describe the policy preferences of most Asian countries with strong activist governments. In Pempel's term, a regime refers to interactions among three components—state institutions, socioeconomic forces, and external factors—that produce discrete political economic configurations as expressed in a country's economic policy paradigm. He offers three general types of regimes to account for either prosperity or plunder in the region. He attributes the economic successes of Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan to their developmental regime characterized by strong state institutions in expedient alliance with local business communities working to achieve industrialization and limit the political and economic influence of challengers. Meanwhile, he classifies Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand as ersatz developmental regimes, which rehearse the activist government and industrialization economic policies of developmental regimes. Unlike developmental regimes, however, the ersatz variety relies on foreign capital to finance its economic goals. Lastly, rapacious regimes, with Myanmar, North Korea, and the Philippines under Marcos as examples, demonstrate highly predatory politico-economic institutions that plunder national wealth, preclude economic development, and exhibit a brutal tendency to stifle opposition. The author observes that China manifests certain characteristics of all types of regimes. He also notes the role of the United States as the politico-economic linchpin of the region.The book meticulously chronicles the formation of the three regimes and their survival and iterations through the waxing and waning US influence in East Asia. However, the discussion wavers as it approaches the post–global recession era. It neglects developmental landmarks with ramifications for the evolution of existing regime types. One notable example is the region's increasing significance not just as a recipient but as a source of foreign direct investment (FDI). In 2014, UNCTAD recognized Asia as the world's largest source of outward FDI while the ersatz regimes of Malaysia and Thailand have begun appearing in UNCTAD's annual list of top twenty sources of the world's FDI alongside developmental regimes and China. Moreover, East Asian multinational corporations have started commanding the attention of the international market. In 2020, Fortune listed China with 133 companies in its Global 500 survey, surpassing the United States with 121 companies for the first time. These imply that East Asian regimes have transcended their influence beyond the region and into the international realm—a point that Pempel's narrative has skipped.Lastly, Pempel accurately describes the region's turn toward “more dense networks of regional integration and cohesion” (175) as a reaction to globalization, economic crises, and the confluence of cooperative interests among Asian actors. Nevertheless, the book's focus on inter-regime interactions and the brief discussion of regionalization and regionalism miss some important intra-regime interactions that influence the internal coherence and external conduct of regimes, particularly from Southeast Asia. For example, the intra-ASEAN FDI share in Southeast Asia has expanded dramatically vis-à-vis the region's traditional partners, posing to gradually replace external partners as major sources of capital in financing the economic agenda of developing regimes. From 2000 to 2019, intra-ASEAN FDI totaled approximately US$265 billion, which registered greater than Japanese and US investments and almost triple of the Chinese Southeast Asian FDI in the same period. These profitable intra-regime interactions, in turn, have convinced Southeast Asians to further institutionalize their engagements as expressed in their adoption of the ASEAN Charter in 2007 and other legally binding instruments in the succeeding years. Far from being passive recipients of capital and regional initiatives, these trends point to a more active role that ersatz regimes are playing in their interactions with each other and the rest of the region.The expansive scope of Pempel's synthesis and typology overlooks some important developmental trends and errs toward oversimplification. However, it is precisely in the book's parsimonious and coherent explication of the complex Asian political economic arrangements that it succeeds as an overview of the region. The book will easily be staple reading for students and observers of East Asia, while its propositions encourage more inquiries into the successes and failures of the varieties of development pathways in the Asia-Pacific.