Search

This article suggests that variations in the dominant pattern of innovation policy coordination can be analysed and understood effectively by dividing innovation and other complementary socio-economic policies into low-complexity and high-complexity tasks. The effective implementation of these two sets of policy tasks that differ in the extent, nature and intractability of collective action problems confronting the coordination process hinges on the strength of two sociopolitical institutions: bureaucratic organizational structures and interactive governing arrangements. While bureaucratic organizational structures are better suited to delivering low-complexity tasks, interactive governing arrangements are more effective in resolving high-complexity policy problems. They interact differently across political economies to structure the management of coordination challenges and thus give rise to divergent patterns of innovation policy-making. The comparative analysis of innovation policy coordination between Hong Kong and Singapore over the past two decades lends strong support to the central theoretical propositions of the article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand have faced comparable innovation challenges over the past decades, they have responded to these challenges with divergent policy choices. More specifically, they have varied in the extent to which core technology policy instruments are integrated and state efforts to tackle innovation challenges are coupled with other socio-economic reforms and development strategies. To explain the variation, this article explores the ways in which socio-political institutions have interacted differently to shape the resolution of governance problems inherent in the making of innovation strategies and generate divergent technology policy processes and outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article suggests a political party-centred explanation of economic policy reforms that differs significantly from the standard theoretical models that emphasise social coalitions, government systems, regime types or electoral cycles. The explanatory approach advanced here focuses on inter-party and intra-party organisational dimensions within an integrated analytical framework as the major determinants of both the decisiveness of policy reforms and the credibility of such reforms. A comparative analysis of government efforts to transform the securities industry in Singapore and Thailand provides preliminary evidence with which to explore the proposed causal linkage between the patterns of stock market reforms and the changing configurations of political parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]