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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]

The dominant institutions of economic governance vary considerably between countries in both Northeast and Southeast Asia, generating four nationally distinct varieties of political–economic organization in terms of varying state direction of the economy and degree of business co-ordination of economic activities: co-governed, state-led, networked and personalized. In the 1980s, Malaysia and Taiwan represented more the state-led variety of capitalist development, while Japan and Thailand shared many characteristics of the networked form. In the 1990s and 2000s, these four political economies began to change, but to different degrees and in different directions. In particular, Taiwan became more similar to the co-governed variety of capitalism, while the degree of business co-ordination declined significantly in Thailand so that its political economy became more personalized. These contrasting kinds of changes in the four economies can best be explained by shifts in the interest and power configurations of dominant coalitions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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]