CIAO DATE: 06/06

Pacific Affairs:
An International Review of Asia and the Pacific

 

Fall 2004 (Vol. 77 No. 3)

Special Issue: The Political Economy of Electricity Reform in Asia
Guest Editors: James H. Williams and Navroz K. Dubash

 

Articles

• Introduction: The Political Economy of Electricity Reform in Asia
  James H. Williams and Navroz K. Dubash

• Asian Electricity Reform in Historical Perspective
  James H. Williams and Navroz K. Dubash

  The laws and institutions governing electric power in Asia are in the midst of an uncertain transition. After decades of state control of electricity, in the 1990s Asian nations began transforming their power sectors to align with globally prevalent neoliberal trends. Following an initial burst of market-oriented reforms, electricity liberalization in Asia has slowed and sometimes dramatically changed course, responding to international events and to country-specific battles over the sector's future. The struggle over the institutional arrangements of electricity is of fundamental economic, political and symbolic importance in Asian societies, and also constitutes an important specific instance of Asia's response to globalization. This paper describes the broad regional context of Asian electricity, with emphasis on the international forces that have shaped the sector's evolution. It starts with an historical sketch of the electricity industry in Asia during the Cold War, followed by a discussion of the origins of electricity reform as a global phenomenon. It then describes the course of electricity reform within Asia, with particular attention to the role of international actors such as foreign investors and the World Bank, and catalytic events such as the Asian financial crisis and the California electricity crisis. The paper shows how, from origins to outcomes, the trajectory of electricity reform in Asian countries has reflected the complex interactions of international and domestic political economy.

• State Power and the Logic of Reform in China's Electricity Sector
  Emily T. Yeh and Joanna I. Lewis

  This article analyzes China's current electricity sector reforms, arguing that they can be understood as a creative response of the party-state to a set of technical and resource constraints on the one hand, and, on the other, to its own dynamics of adapting to internal and external changes in order to maintain legitimacy. The article discusses how the historical trajectory of China's power sector development shaped current technical constraints. Geopolitical concerns about energy security, the growing importance of international financial institutions for attracting the necessary foreign investment to build new capacity, and continuing problems with state-owned enterprises are all important factors in constraining the state's ability to respond to existing technical and economic challenges. At the same time, the Communist Party's reinvention of itself in a bid to stay in power also motivates and shapes its decisions about electricity. Moreover, the imbrication of the electric power sector with elite politics and top leaders' personal power bases give the sector special importance in the larger process of reform. After discussing these issues, the article examines four challenges to successful electricity reform in China: recurring power shortages and surpluses, price distortions and market manipulations, institutional reorganization, and inter-regional equity. These challenges illustrate the larger and sometimes unintended consequences of reforms in the electricity sector.

• Current Reforms: The Politics of Policy Change in India's Electricity Sector
  Sunila S. Kale

  Since Independence in 1947, India's electricity sector has twice undergone broad policy change. In the 1950s, publicly owned, vertically integrated monopoly utilities were established in each state. Since the early 1990s, there has been a push to reverse earlier policies by including market strategies and private actors in the sector. This essay suggests that these moments of transformation are best understood with reference to the interests and political power of dominant groups within India, coupled with the prevailing global economic ideology. In the 1950s, the global norm for the sector advocated public ownership, which accorded well with the interests of India's industrialists and bureaucrats alike. By the 1990s, however, an emergent global consensus advocated the entry of private actors to the electricity industry. Within India, industrialists, increasingly dissatisfied with high tariffs and unreliable supply, have supported the new consensus. However, agricultural groups who profit from extensive subsidies, and elected state politicians who benefit by maintaining control of politically sensitive tariffs, have proven resistant to change. The interplay of such a wide panoply of interests has had mixed effects on the functioning of the sector. Indian states have undertaken a variety of restructuring measures, with varying results. The central governmentthe focus of this paperhas promoted a series of policy initiatives, culminating with the Electricity Act 2003, to increase private ownership and market strategies. The tussle over electricity reform in India is further complicated by a current rethinking of the strategies of marketization and privatization of electricity functions.

• Electricity Reform at a Crossroads: Problems in South Korea's Power Liberalization Strategy
  John Byrne, Leigh Glover, Hoesung Lee, Young-DooWang and Jung-Min Yu

  South Korea's economic miracle was founded on a rapidly expanding electricity sector, using a model we term 'synergistic development,' in which electricity and economic growth are regarded as mutually reinforcing imperatives of modernization. A legacy of the model has been high public sector debt, extensive use of nuclear energy, high environmental costs, and low public accountability. During its 35-year pursuit of synergistic development, South Korea was transformed socially and politically, replacing a military dictatorship with a democracy and evolving an active civil society, while becoming integrated into the global economy. When the Asian economic crisis hit South Korea in 1997, the electricity sector's financial vulnerability was exposed and structural adjustment measures were demanded by the international financial community. In response, South Korea revised its development model, embracing a neoliberal reform programme we term 'harmonized development.' The liberalization and privatization plan was of unusual scope and ambition. But by June 2004, the government had lost confidence in the ideal of harmonization and halted the sector's privatization. In this paper, the economic, political, social and environmental contradictions of the reform effort in South Korea's electricity sector are analyzed.

• Thailand's Electricity Reforms: Privatization of Benefits and Socialization of Costs and Risks
  Chuenchom Sangarasri Greacen and Chris Greacen

  Over the past five decades Thailand's electricity arrangements have evolved from largely self-regulated state-owned utilities, to limited private-sector participation (under small power producer and independent power producer programmes), to officially approved plans for retail competition. A recent shift to a "National Champion" self-regulated monopoly model for generation and transmission maintains a focus on privatization but de-emphasizes competition and independent regulation, and raises substantial concerns for small consumers and the environment. This historical narrative traces the governance of the Thai electricity sector, including "electricity reform" in its various manifestations. In the context of Thailand's ongoing social and economic transformations, we examine the roles of government, utilities, NGOs, multilateral institutions, and the private sector in shaping electricity governance. Key features include politically potent electric utilities that have been able to successfully reject certain aspects of neo-liberal reform (competition, regulatory oversight) while embracing others (stock market capitalization); a significant cadre of well-placed individuals able to benefit from transfers of public assets to the private sphere; and a civil society that has had difficulty in identifying and preventing electricity sector activities that run counter to the public interest.

Books Reviewed in this Issue

Asia General

• The Russian Far East: A Reference Guide for Conservation and Development, Second Edition. By Josh Newell.
  Reviewed By Victor Zatsepine

• Whither Free Trade Agreements?: Proliferation, Evaluation and Multilateralization. Edited by Jiro Okamoto.
  Reviewed By Mark S. Manger

• Globalization And Educational Restructuring In The Asia Pacific Region. Edited by Ka-ho Mok and Anthony Welch.
  Reviewed By Jennifer Chan-Tiberghien

• Asian Security Order: Instrumental and Normative Features. Edited by Muthiah Alagappa.
  Reviewed By Shaun Narine

• Media And Politics In Pacific Asia. By Duncan McCargo.
  Reviewed By Robin Jeffrey

• Handle With Care: Ownership and Control of Ethnographic Materials. By Sjoerd R. Jaarsma.
  Reviewed By Carol E. Mayer

China and Inner Asia

• China After Jiang. Edited by Gang Lin and Xiaobo Hu.
  Reviewed By Yongnian Zheng

• China's Minorities On The Move: Selected Case Studies. Edited by Robyn Iredale, Naran Bilik and Fei Guo.
  Reviewed By Colin Mackerras

• Private Life Under Socialism: Love, Intimacy and Family Change in a Chinese Village, 1949-1999. By Yunxiang Yan.
  Reviewed By Robert L. Moore

• Mutual Empowerment Of State And Peasantry: Village Self-Government in Rural China. By Xu Wang.
  Reviewed By John James Kennedy

• The Impact Of Buddhism On Chinese Material Culture. By John Kieschnick.
  Reviewed By Robert Ford Campany

• China Made: Consumer Culture and the Creation of the Nation. By Karl Gerth.
  Reviewed By Frank Dikötter

• Chinese Society, 2nd Edition: Change, Conflict, and Resistance. Edited by Elizabeth J. Perry and Mark Selden.
  Reviewed By David J. Davies

• Red Capitalists In China: The Party, Private Entrepreneurs, and Prospects for Political Change. By Bruce J. Dickson.
  Reviewed By Kenneth W. Foster

• The Soviet Union And Communist China, 1945-1950: The Arduous Road to the Alliance. By Dieter Heinzig.
  Reviewed By Xiaoyuan Liu

• Frontier Passages: Ethnopolitics and the Rise of Chinese Communism, 1921-1945. By Xiaoyuan Liu.
  Reviewed By Henrietta Harrison

• Full Circle: A Life with Hong Kong and China. By Ruth Hayhoe.
  Reviewed By Gerard Postiglione

• 400 Million Customers: The Experiences ­ Some Happy, Some Sad of an American in China and What They Taught Him. By Carl Crow.
  Reviewed By Stephen R. MacKinnon

• Oil For The Lamps Of China. By Alice Tisdale Hobart.
  Reviewed By Stephen R. MacKinnon

• Between Shanghai And Hong Kong: The Politics of Chinese Cinemas. By Poshek Fu.
  Reviewed By Tina Mai Chen

• Heijin: Organized Crime, Business and Politics in Taiwan. By Ko-lin Chin.
  Reviewed By Joseph Wong

Northeast Asia

• The End Of Diversity?: Prospects for German and Japanese Capitalism. Edited by Kozo Yamamura and Wolfgang Streeck.
  Reviewed By Mark Tilton

• Quand Les Sumos Apprennent À Danser: la fin du modèle Japonais (When the Sumos Learn to Dance: the end of the Japanese model). By Jean-Marie Bouissou.
  Reviewed By Yves Tiberghien

• Japan's Security Agenda: Military, Economic & Environmental Dimensions. By Christopher W. Hughes.
  Reviewed By David Arase

• The New Japanese Woman: Modernity, Media, and Women in Interwar Japan.By Barbara Sato.
  Reviewed By Elaine Gerbert

• Japan And Its Others. By John Clammer.
  Reviewed By William W. Kelly

• EMOTIONS AT WORK: Normative Control, Organizations, and Culture in Japan and America. By Aviad E. Raz.
  Reviewed By Julian Dierkes

• The Artist As Professional In Japan. Edited by Melinda Takeuchi.
  Reviewed By Monika Dix

• Rebuilding Urban Japan After 1945. Edited by Carola Hein, Jeffry M. Diefendorf and Ishida Yorifusa.
  Reviewed By Jeff Alexander

• New Worlds, New Lives: Globalization and People of Japanese Descent in the Americas and from Latin America in Japan. Edited by Lane Ryo Hirabayashi, Akemi Kikumura-Yano and James A. Hirabayashi.
  Reviewed By Robert Efird

• Searching For Home Abroad: Japanese Brazilians and Transnationalism. Edited by Jeffery Lesser.
  Reviewed By Robert Efird

• The Japanese In Latin America. By Daniel M. Masterson with Sayaka Funada-Classen.
  Reviewed By Carl Mosk

• Keigo In Modern Japan: Polite Language from Meiji to the Present. By Patricia J. Wetzel.
  Reviewed By Joseph F. Kess

• Korean Endgame: A Strategy for Unification and U.S. Disengagement. By Selig S. Harrison.
  Reviewed By Yasuhiro Izumikawa

South Asia

• Migration, Common Property, Resources And Environmental Degradation: Interlinkages in India's Arid and Semi-arid Regions. By Kanchan Chopra and S.C. Gulati.
  Reviewed By K. Sivaramakrishnan

• Does Civil Society Matter?: Governance in Contemporary India. Edited by Rajesh Tandon and Ranjita Mohanty.
  Reviewed By Shaila Seshia

• The Scandal Of The State: Women, Law and Citizenship in Postcolonial India. By Rajeswari Sunder Rajan.
  Reviewed By Linda K. Richter

• Globalization And South Asia: Multidimensional Perspectives. Edited by Achin Vanaik.
  Reviewed By William L. Richter

• Constituting Communities: Theravåda Buddhism and the Religious Cultures of South and Southeast Asia. Edited by John Clifford Holt, Jacob N. Kinnard and Jonathan S. Walters.
  Reviewed By Dagmar Hellmann-Rajanayagam

• Christians Of India. By Rowena Robinson.
  Reviewed By Paul Younger

Southeast Asia

• Burma's Armed Forces: Power without Glory. By Andrew Selth.
  Reviewed By Robert H. Taylor

• Making Enemies: War and State Building in Burma. By Mary P. Callahan.
  Reviewed By Josef Silverstein

• Indonesian Politics And Society: A Reader. Edited by David Bourchier and Vedi R. Hadiz.
  Reviewed By John Roosa

• Forests Of Fortuney: The Environmental History of Southeast Borneo, 1600-1880. By Hans Knapen.
  Reviewed By Fadzilah Majid Cooke

• The Transformation Of Southeast Asia: International Perspectives on Decolonization. Edited by Marc Frey, Ronald W. Pruessen, and Tan Tai Yong.
  Reviewed By Clive Christie

• The Kraton: Selected Essays on Javanese Courts. Edited by Stuart Robson.
  Reviewed By Vincent Houben

Australasia and the Pacific Region

• Parties Long Estranged: Canada and Australia in the Twentieth Century. Edited by Margaret MacMillan and Francine McKenzie.
  Reviewed By Robert J. Williams

• The Experience Of Middle Australia: The Dark Side of Economic Reform. By Michael Pusey.
  Reviewed By Moazzem Hossain

• Unbending Cane: Pablo Manlapit, A Filipino Labor Leader in Hawai'i. By Melinda Tria Kerkvliet.
  Reviewed By Terri Aihoshi

• Inventing Politics: A New Political Anthropology of the Hawaiian Kingdom. By Juri Mykkänen.
  Reviewed By Alexander Mawyer

• Journeys In A Small Canoe: The Life and Times of a Solomon Islander. By Lloyd Maepeza Gina, edited by Judith A. Bennett with Khyla J. Russell.
  Reviewed By Terry Brown

• A Date Which Will Live: Pearl Harbor in American Memory. By Emily S. Rosenburg.
  Reviewed By Peter W. Black