El próximo 21 de febrero a las 19.00h tendrá lugar la presentación y discusión del libro de Simon Commander, The Connections World: The Future of Asian Capitalism. En él participarán el autor, Simon Commander de Altura Partners & IE business School, Miguel Sebastián de la Universidad Complutense y Bárbara Navarro del Banco Santander y estará moderado por Angel de la Fuente de Fedea.
Resumen
Many believe that the 21st century belongs to Asia. Those claims demand scrutiny. To date, Asia’s development model has depended on industrial policy to support new sectors along with a common reliance on large and powerful business groups. These groups use close and highly transactional connections with politicians to acquire assets, secure financing and other preferential treatment. Not only does the resulting economic firepower of these business groups allow them to dominate the various markets in which they operate, but it also allows them to achieve significant scale relative to the economy as a whole. This has been matched by a parallel and rapid accumulation and concentration of wealth. We call this, the Connections World. [Simon Commander and Saul Estrin, The Connections World: The Future of Modern Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2022]. Although it has, for the most part, supported Asia’s extraordinary growth, problems with this model, and the configuration of economic and political power that it has enabled, are mounting. Demographics challenge reliance on extensive growth while the attenuation of competition holds back productivity growth, limits the number of high-quality jobs and, most significantly, stands in the way of Asia shifting to greater reliance on innovation. In short, Asia’s further climb up the income ladder has nothing automatic about it. New policies for corporate governance, taxation and the design of competition policy will be needed. Failure to come to grips with the Connections World will impair the brightness of Asia’s future.
