Challenges for the Regulatory State in Asia

In the contemporary age of globalization, strong pressures exist on all states to utilise a common recipe of policy measures to meet public policy objectives: privatization, removal of barriers to trade and foreign investment, deregulation and re-regulation to strengthen competitive pressures. This has led to the emergence of the ‘regulatory state’ as a global phenomenon. This book explores the implications of the rise of the regulatory state in Asia, focusing in particular on how it has affected governance and state capacity. Drawing upon detailed case studies and fieldwork conducted across Asia, including interviews with important policymakers, it examines the critical issues and major challenges for governance and the regulatory regime when policy areas become more market-oriented, comparing how different policy instruments adopted in different public policy areas, including telecommunications, higher education and health management, have changed the delivery of services and altered relationships between service providers. It reflects critically upon how the pro-competition policy tools originally imported from the West can adapt effectively to the Asian socio-political and socio-economic contexts, investigating to what extent the Asian governments have transformed the ideas and practices of neo-liberalism and public choice theories into actual policy practices, and appraising whether they can at the same time successfully maintain their state capacity and rich cultural and traditional foundations. It argues that the Asian regulatory state, far from being a homogenous entity, is always shaped by local administrative cultures and political circumstances, and hence there are actually several different varieties of regulatory regime throughout Asia, owing to differing legacies of domestic policies and political interests.